Hawk sat, several hours into her drive, looking at her driveway. It was full of cars, which was odd. There should have been just the one. Her sedan, which was at least where she left it, was now surrounded by those ugly black gun-grip vans. And there were people in rather scary looking white lab coats going in and out of her house. She didn’t remember giving permission for that.

Sarcasm was sometimes the best recourse for sheer, unholy terror.

Being a scientist, she took a minute to study this strange variant in human behavior: the break-in. She'd never experienced it before, and in her wildest imaginings she'd only ever thought of the usual cultural boogeyman, the ones spiced with the sort of racism one absorbs by osmosis. The sort of disenfranchised street thug you can feel empathy for, with a tough-love montage over tastefully clean community service. Life as a hackneyed Hallmark movie. She was almost disappointed. Her burglers were inhuman, in white clean suits that masked all but the vaguest hominoid shape. She didn't feel any guilt at all when she reached for the phone and reported strange people in her house to the police.

Hawk was not stupid. Willheim had done this, probably because he expected her and Alex to be dead. So, if they were not dead, and were not at home, she and Alex would have eventually returned and, being reasonable human beings who don't want to complicate things with red tape, would have walked in and mouthed off to people who most likely had the guns to match their cars. Hawk and Alex would then be escorted wherever Willheim wanted them to go, and Hawk felt like Willheim could absolutely miss her with that noise.

It wasn't as lovely a song as Bring in the Clowns, but "Bring in the Cops" still had a pretty nice ring to it. And it helped a lot that Alex had some good contacts with the local PD. After she got off the phone with 911 she called one of them, a pretty high ranking detective who had been golfing with the mayor since before his election, and who was god-father to the chief's oldest son. Hawk disliked using that kind of sideways power, but she knew Willheim had more than she did, and wouldn't hesitate to use it. Larry Powers picked up on the second ring.

"Hey-Lo," he said. He was one of those down-home folksy boys in his public face. It put Hawk's teeth on edge, but the guy knew politics. He didn't like them, but at his level he had to play them. Being folksy was a bit like being a Democrat. He did it pretty well.

"Larry, it's Hawk West."

Immediately, he dropped the folk. "What's up?" he said. Her tone must have informed him that things weren't good. He played the game to keep his job, because he was too good at being a cop to stay on his own merits. Honest people do not prosper without first learning how to lie.

"I have a house full of weird white suits who have no permission to be there, but if they are who I think they are, their boss is going to tell your people—probably your boss, here in about twenty minutes—that they have authorization from somebody. They do not have mine. I strongly suspect that they do not have anybody's. I need to get into my house to get a couple things."

"And you want some cops who aren't going to smile and nod when your big bad guy starts flashing money and threats around. Copy. Who is it?"

"You won't believe it," She warned. "Kaiser Willheim."

Dead silence on the other end of the phone. And then a whistle. "Hooo. Boy. Yeah. So it's that fucking mess."

"You know a lot about it?" She said.

"The dead old lady," he said. Hesitated. "You heard she died, right?"

"I got the idea that if she wasn't, it wasn't gonna be long. Same day, right?" She said.

"Yes." A pause. "I had one of the doctors who worked on her in my office. Guy looked like they'd scrubbed him with sandpaper. He said they could have kept that old woman going for at least another couple of days, or at least gotten her stable enough that she and her daughter could have had a last goodbye, but they evacuated the ER and left the old lady in there. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

She did. She had the image in technicolor, for all that her imagined emergency room wasn't the one in reality. The rows of chairs of waiting people, many of them sick and sobbing, and the smell of illness heavy in the air, human excretions and antiseptic, hope and fear and despair layered like enamel paint in a factory. Here's a birth, and hope, and death, and grief, a diagnosis of cancer, of terminality, of remission, of cure. Layer on layer on layer on layer, the archeology of human culture, resting. And here is one little branch of it, an old woman, dying. And there was a drama she could imagine, the men in black—it's always black, and tactical vests, and scary guns—rushing and ordering and pushing, and the shouts of protest and the tears. But the important part: a dying old woman. Her body is burning to a strange glassy ash and she is in pain, and whatever else she feels or sees, she knows that there are people there who love her, who are fighting for her, and that if she loses this battle it will be in the presence of those who matter to Elizabeth Cummings, and that's all that needs to matter. Except this final vigil is shattered. Hands, gloved or bare, black or white, armed or not, are ripping this woman's final comfort away. The last things she witnessed were an empty room and the echoes of her own vitals as, slowly, she wound down.

Maybe the tragedy of a broken clock only comes when no one is there to hear that last tick.

"Pissed off a lot of people, did they?"

"About eight really fragile patients died because of the way they handled that evacuation. The morgue is shut down. Families still can't get their loved ones for burial. How many people you need, Hawk? I know exactly who to call."

She left that to his discretion, sat back, and watched the show.

The first two cop cars arrived about ten minutes after she wrapped up with Larry. One car looked to be a vet and a trainee, and the other a couple of twenty-somethings. Probably the people sent by dispatch for her first call. They pulled up and got out, guns drawn, and began yelling. She couldn't hear from this distance, but given that hands went up and knees met dirt, she suspected it was the usual. Get down. Hands up. You're under arrest.

Somebody who looked a little more important than the rest of the white suits came out and began talking rapidly. They continued to talk rapidly as they were put in handcuffs and lead to the curb with the growing collection of white suits in silver bracelets. Another cop car pulled up, and then a van. Hawk didn't think these were Larry's people, either, but they could have been.

One of the black cars showed up. The men in black got out, strangely absent the big guns and tac vests. They suddenly looked like overgrown security guards again, and Hawk had to wonder if Willheim kept a bunch of slightly-out-of-shape mercs just to show to cops. Hey, we don't have paramilitary troops. They're security guards. See? This one's fat.

The body language on display shifted in a way Hawk didn't like, but had expected. A shift in empathy. A couple cops stopped cuffing white suits and looked like they'd been caught doing something bad. Hawk guessed what the bad guys said was a variation on We're from the government, we're here to help.

And that was when four cop cars and a second van arrived, and these absolutely were Larry Powers' people, because they came out of the cars like a pit bull after a bleeding rat. And Larry was right behind them, yelling just as loud. After about five minutes of yelling—some of it loud enough to reach Hawk, because she heard Larry shouting BUUUUUL-shit and she was still in her car—the cops rallied and began herding white suits into vans.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Her phone rang. It was Larry.

"Hey," she said.

"Oh, boy did you make the right call here, sugar. These yahoos had my boys about to hand the house over to them. They said you died of the same shit that killed the old woman."

"Alright. I'm going to come get what I need, and then we can sort shit out from there. Did it look like they touched any of my terrariums?"

"I haven't been inside," Larry said. "A couple of 'em look like you got ants, though."

She sighed. "Yes, Larry. I know. There are ants in the terrariums."

She hung up and drove back to her house. Funny. Looking at it with all those white suits being lined up on her lawn made her feel like she'd been violated. I bet Willheim can write a check big enough to fix it, she thought. Paused as she got out of the car and realized these knuckleheads had obliterated her peace roses. It's gonna be one hell of a fucking big check.

She walked up to Larry. "Hey," she said, brightly. The white suit and all three of the knock-off security guards turned dead white. She smiled at them. Gave them a tight little finger wave. She turned to Larry. "These idiots are investigating the same thing Alex and I are. We've got a lead, but I gotta go in and get a couple things." And she turned to the white suits. "Did your people do anything to my insect collection?"

"You're not Haven West," the white suit said. It sounded almost like he was praying.

"Okay. Did you do anything to Haven's insect collection?"

"No," the man said. Paused. "But ants got to them, I think. At least, I noticed they were inside the enclosures." Another pause.

She didn't know if she should feel comforted or start screaming.

She walked into the house. There was an arrested white suit sitting in her foyer shouting at a cop. She hoped that the mayor, in the conversation that would absolutely be happening in the next couple days, got one hell of a big donation to the local PD over this. Into the living room, where her five-year-old camponotus colony sat in a beautifully moss-scaped terrarium, with a water feature and the perfect piece of dry-rotted driftwood as both formicarium and centerpiece. The white suit who had been forced to sit on her couch—her favorite thinking spot, because she could watch the ants visit the sugar source from here—said "I can recommend some bait, you know. For the infestation." And a chin jerk at the colony Hawk had shepherded so carefully.

"The only infestation here is you." She said, and went for the ant room.

The door was ajar. Fuck. That door was never open because the A/C would get in. She rushed now, because there were ten active colonies in that room and only three were anything close to what she'd consider durable. And the most fragile were the ants she'd come to get. She crossed in front of her Tetramorium Bicarenatum colony, her Pogomyrmex, the pheidole barbata she'd picked up at a picnic last summer. Each sat in an enclosure she'd made with care. When her agnostic soul first heard the story of the Garden of Eden she had no trouble believing a god could do such a thing, make a garden of perfection for creatures who would never understand it, because she'd done the same herself. Each piece of driftwood, each rock, each plant. The collection of soil critters. The diet for the feeder insects, and their care. The ants didn't need to know the work their unseen keeper did for them. She knew. Seeing them healthy and thriving, being able to watch them...hell, being able to have them in a way that made both them and herself safe? That was reward enough.

You've got ants. I can call my cousin, the exterminator. A can of raid will fix that. Maybe try bait? Ask a woman to smother her own child, you'd get the same reaction. Hawk didn't punch people for suggesting insecticide. She just imagined it. Repeatedly.

And here were the honeypots. These were the youngest colonies in the room, and they were in the smallest boxes. Two formicarium, each four inches square. Two small acrylic cases, the sort one would display a baseball in, with holes drilled in and a plaster floor, a little bit of dried moss to act as xeriscaping. Oh, she had plans for these ants' future home. They involved honeysuckle and active water features and a carefully designed plaster formicarium to act as housing. But that would be years down the road, when the colony could take more stress. Right now she was worried the drive back to Emile might be too much for them to handle. There were perhaps ten repletes left in each little box. Their swollen abdomins, grape-sized, swayed slightly with each movement. Their jewel-tones glowed.

We can design a billion ways to kill things, but oh god could we make just one to keep everything alive?

She disconnected formicarium from outworld, thought for a minute, and then went back into the main house for an igloo cooler. She didn't want it warm. She didn't want it cool. She wanted it to stay the exact temperature it was in this room. She rubber banded the formicariums' tops to their bases—the lids were panes of glass, held in place by magnets—and wrapped the precious things in towels. Into the box. Outworlds next. She didn't usually move her ants further than from one table to another, so she wasn't sure what else she could grab. Their nectar, and some extra feeders. Pipettes. Her feathertouch forceps because she might need to pick up a replete or, god forbid, the Queen (any time she handled a Queen, she held her breath. One slip of her big dumb human fingers and that's the whole colony, dead).

That was enough. She gave her remaining colonies another good scan, then decided to top off all their waters and sugars, and dropped fish pellets in her backup feeding dishes. Her ants did not, as a rule, take fish pellets unless they were very, very hungry. But they might get that kind of hungry.

She left the room with the cooler in hand. "Got it," she said, smiling.

"What is it?" the nearest white suit, the important-looking one, said.

She ignored him. "I would like to press charges, but I don't think those are going to last longer than a day."

"We're gonna drag our feet. It'll take two," Larry said, smiling. With teeth.

"Willheim won't stand for this," the guy said, and then shut up.

Larry looked around the suddenly very attentive group of cops. It was, she thought, rather like a group of hunting hounds when they maybe caught sight of a fox's tail. Then he whistled through those same teeth. "Now, my friend, that is a very odd place to name drop your boss."

"He's not—" a pause. "I was just—" pause. Sigh. "It was a mistake."

"Made in front of—" a pause to count, "eight, nine, ten. Ten cops, plus the homeowner, all heard you start to make a threat invoking the name Willheim. Who I assume is Kaiser Willheim, which means my very next phone call is probably going to a lawyer who is about to have an incredibly bad day." Larry paused again, surveying the yard full of arrested scientists with an air of amusement. "And that's before we add in charges about abduction, obstruction of justice and manslaughter."

"Manslaughter?!" the important looking man hit a register reserved for operatic sopranos.

"Eight people died because of that nonsense you people pulled at the hospital. Eight. Not counting the old woman. Two heart attacks, one stroke-sufferer, one seriously critical car accident patient—this one was nineteen—a woman entering sepsis, a fifteen-year-old in the middle of a heroin overdose, a ten year old in anaphylaxis and a twenty-two week micropremie whose mother delivered in the parking lot. They couldn't get the kid to a neonatal ICU in time. I know these deaths. I know the names of the people who died. I went to each one of their families and they all asked the same question. Why? What was so bad that they had to lose their loved ones." A pause. "So yes. I am not going to throw the book at Kaiser Willheim. I'm throwing the whole goddamn library at that motherfucker. If I have to buy the fucking servers for Wikipedia, I'll throw that at him too. And I know as soon as we let you, you're calling him so you pass that on."

The man began stuttering. "You don't...you don't..."

"You don't what?" Hawk said.

"You don't just tell that to a man like Kaiser Willheim."

"Why not? He had no problem telling me and Alex to get lost when we asked to work with you. He said you all had more than enough people. I believe him. But I also don't trust him, so Alex and I are running our own investigation."

"You can't do that," the man said.

Larry interrupted. "Her husband is a P.I. He's licensed to do that." Then he turned to Hawk. "I promise you half these people have already texted the son of a bitch. You need to start driving. Now. Hey, Addams, Levis," and two of the more competent looking cops in the yard left the home invaders alone. "You're going to escort Dr. West wherever she wants to go. If you believe someone is following her, you will pull them over and detain until I or someone else respond."

From the way the suits reacted, Hawk figured there absolutely was somebody waiting in the wings to follower her. Willheim would be an idiot if he didn't. She shrugged.

"What did you get?" the important suit shouted. "What was so important that it was worth all this?"

"I had to come rescue the most valuable pets I own." She said, smiling gently as she walked away. "Your people kept threatening them with a can of Raid."