Hawk was followed.

It was expected, and a part of whatever was going down with Larry Powers and the white suit brigade. They pulled the first car over within ten minutes of Hawk leaving Phoenix. The second, third, and fourth cars were more subtle about things. Hawk relayed three of their license plates to Larry, and added that there was a fourth, and she was going to let it follow her.

"Why?" he said.

"It's an Alex thing," she said. "I can't stop him from putting more cars on me, so having you get the state troopers on the other three will make them think they got away with something. Telling them we let them follow me will take some wind out of their sails."

Larry chuckled. "Where are you going, anyway?"

"I have a colleague who is the human version of a raccoon on crack. They've hoarded enough scientific equipment to tempt the ghost of Albert Einstein and the only time they talk about Willheim is with 'that fucker' attached. Why?"

"I'm thinking I'll head on over to check in on you later tonight." Larry said.

Translation: Larry was going to give Hawk's tail enough time to settle in for a nice distant surveillance, and then give a hired merc a heart attack. "They really pissed you off, didn't they?"

"Well...Hawk, did you know how many people died yesterday, that didn't have to? Eight people. Nine, if we count the old woman."

"Elizabeth Cummings." She paused. "Can you give me their names, too? The eight that died."

"I will. Even the baby had a name. Did I tell you that? They named him after me. I was the one who helped that woman deliver, and I stood there with this tiny little dying baby in my hands and listened as the doctors counseled the parents for palliative care. Because they weren't getting that baby to an ICU in time and every single person in that parking lot knew it except the parents." A pause. "And we still tried."

She tried to imagine it, a baby with unfinished skin in Larry's big hands. They weren't that big in any other context, but here they were enormous. Hams. Elephants. Skyscrapers towering over a person whose skin is barely paper-thin, whose bones are still more rubber than ivory, whose lungs can barely breathe. This was the world where they wrap babies in plastic because the softest fabric would sandpaper their skin away, and in this birthing-place there was only harsh sky and dull asphalt.

It's the part of a disaster people never see. The secondary deaths. These aren't the people at ground zero, trapped by dust and rubble, bleeding. These are the people who would be safe at home, but for the heart attack, the car crash. Sudden labor. Anaphylaxis. Emergencies whose space is now filled by triage. They have to wait. And time is ticking down for them, too. Every bed filled by a survivor of an earthquake, or a tidal wave, or nuclear disaster, is one that cannot be filled by someone with a more mundane ailment. And mundane did not mean "non-lethal." You can die from a paper cut, if the infection goes untreated.

"We're gonna make this count for something, right, Hawk?" Larry said.

"We're going to try. And if all we accomplish is better transparency...that's still pretty good." Her voice broke a bit on the last.

"What's got you still upset, Hawk?" Larry said.

"I keep thinking of historical parallels. It took international pressure to get the USSR to evacuate Prypiat, days after Chernobyl blew up. And they didn't have a for-profit corporation running the thing."

"They also didn't have the internet and tik-tok. Listen to me, kid. This is fucking everywhere right now. Not the disaster, but the dead people at the hospital. We haven't heard jack shit about why, but it wouldn't take a lot to get the old woman's name to the press."

And they would go to her house. Which would be good, if her house wasn't lethally contaminated. "Don't do that." She said. Very fast. "Or...at least, don't do that yet. If we have to, we have to. And I think we will have to. But...this shit's worse than radiation, Larry. It's more lethal, and Willheim's people are treating it with essential oils...and it's working."

"Like what? Rubbing a boil with orange oil? I got an aunt who does that shit. Always smells like somebody dumped a box of pointy swords on her air freshener," Larry said.

"And I hear the down-home boy in your voice. You're lying," she said. "You know how bad that is, same as I do."

"Laws of physics say a bottle of orange oil shouldn't do jack shit, except maybe make fleas bite someone else's dog, and patchouli is how you cover up weed smell. So if suddenly these things are doing more..."

"It's almost like we're breaking the laws of physics. Which we can't actually do. So that means this stuff might just behave whole new laws that we haven't discovered before--and that, sir, scares the shit out of me."

"Justifying MLMs now, huh," Larry sighed.

"I only know of two of those that pitch essential oils. You won't make money at either, and the founder of one drowned his own baby. So regardless of what the oils are doing to the unknown energy, we can safely say there is zero justification for joining a multi-level marketing scheme to sell essential oils." Hawk took a breath. "So now that you have the PSA, can we get three of my four tails off my ass, please?"

She started seeing flares of cherries and berries within five minutes of that phone call. This would almost have been fun...if she weren't waiting for a text from Larry with eight new names to memorize.

But when she was almost at Emile's house, she watched a curious drama occur with her tail. It was a pedestrian white sedan, the sort that had "Rental" printed all over it. Too clean. Too impersonal. She watched as a 1950s era Chevy pickup truck slowly pulled up beside the tail. The tail flashed hazards and then began to drop back, allowing the chevy to take its place.

As a test, Hawk flashed her own hazards at the unknown. They flashed back.

Uh-huh.

She called Alex. He answered with a "Yo, got honey ants?"

"Honey and tails. You wanna do me a favor? Look up Willheim and see if he's got any photos of himself with a mint 50s truck. The kind with the big ass wheel wells."

She didn't have to wait long. Alex muttered a litany of Lambo, Lambo, Porshe, Firebird, and then whistled. "1957 Chevy Cameo, baby blue, whitewall tires. That's beyond mint. I don't give a shit about this guy anymore, Hawk. That's a beautiful car."

"I know," she said, starting to smile. "I can see its grill in my rear view mirror."

She hung up. Kept driving, comfortably paced by the blue Cameo. No rush. The game had been played to its ending. She and Alex had danced sufficiently for the emperor's amusement. Now it was time to seek his favor.

It was enough to make you spit.

Except she didn't think Kaiser was entirely happy with how this had ended. Because She and Alex were supposed to be dead, right? Or if not dead, at least severely hurt. He'd wound them both up to audition for his little club, and left out the important warnings. What better way to eliminate awkward witnesses?

Emile's house was lit up like Christmas when she got there. Complete with...she blinked as the sound truly reached her. Diggy...diggy...hole? She listened and yes. It was a heavy metal group singing "I am a Dwarf and I'm digging a hole/Diggy Diggy Hole/Diggy Diggy Hole." And there might have been some other verses in there, but her brain had just jumped the tracks hard enough to leave divots in her cranium.

She parked in Emile's driveway as Diggy Diggy Hole gave way to something called The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything. Also heavy metal. It didn't sound like a song that was supposed to be sung to heavy metal. Alex and Emile were standing side by side, looking somewhat smug.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

She parked. Got out with her ant box. Watched as the blue chevy navigated both the caliche drive and the sonic blast of Oh I've never been to Greenland/and I've never been to Denver, and a drum being hammered so thoroughly it sounded like gunshots. It wasn't ear piercing, but she had to shout a bit to say, "What the hell? Diggy Diggy Hole?"

"We are about to speak with a man who prides himself on his intelligence and class," Alex said. "And we are sending a message that we do not give a solitary shit about either."

"But...Diggy Diggy Hole?" She said.

"Emile," Alex was grinning harder, "has an impressive collection of heavy metal filking covers."

The Chevy had parked. Hawk frowned. "What's filking?"

"Fan made folk music. Like, somewhere in the mix there's Leonard Nimoy singing the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, and it is the most 70s thing you've ever heard in your life." Alex watched the chevy settle in place like he wanted to take Emile's replica of the spiked bat from the Walking Dead to the classic car's perfect paint job.

"So you're pissed. You predicted this, but you're pissed." Hawk said.

"There's a lot of things my father taught me to hate, love. Being jerked around by a jackass tops the list." A pause. "You gonna say it out loud, or should I?"

"He set us up to die," Hawk said.

"Yep. You gonna remember that when he starts smiling at us?" He said.

"Probably not." She agreed.

"I'll remember for both of you," Emile said. "Son-of-a-bitch bought my favorite internet hangout spot and let it turn into a transphobic hellmouth. He can kiss my enby ass."

Kaiser William's appearance was as well-tended to as his classic truck, something that disturbed Hawk for an odd reason, something she couldn't quite put her finger on past a vague sense of wrong. His truck was perfect, as a classic car ought to be, with a mirror-perfect finish and just the slightest hint of modern glitter flake. This car felt that sort of layered, as if the hands—Kaiser's—on the wheel were only the latest pair. And that was what keyed Hawk into why her gut felt vaguely sour. Kaiser's clothes did not match the car. Yes, they were the down-home, country boy sort of denim and flannel—blue denim, of course, and red flannel, with the prerequisite white undershirt presumably hidden by the buttons at his throat—but it was a bit...too country. It was all too clearly pure aesthetics, from the perfect beige leather rancher boots—not even one speck of dirt—to the aesthetic of his pants. They weren't quite frayed symmetrical, but the effect was too artful, distribution too controlled, and locations too nonsensical for it to be the usual result of wear. Especially not when the blues in these jeans were still the jeweled tone of deepest summer.

In short: Kaiser had dressed the way he thought a hard-working man would. But even in her worst throes of bug-mania, and even as frayed as they were, Hawk would never have worn jeans this clean anywhere other than an office.

Alex leaned over. "Round one, we got the billionaire. Round two, we get the down-home boy. What do you think Round Three will be?"

She shrugged. Willheim was looking distrustfully at Em's gate.

"You really called Larry on his people?" Alex added.

"You disapprove?" She said.

"I'm proud as paint of you, babe, but you don't normally go into 'fuck you' mode right out the gate."

She flushed a bit. "I just pretended that Kaiser was your father."

This got her a thumb's up and a hasty hug, because they were now out of time. Kaiser had moseyed up the walk. Maybe it was supposed to make Hawk think of power and of leverage, and of sharks gliding. It reminded Hawk of Finnigan's Rainbow, the scene where the wealthy man forces a black man—poor, but brighter than all the rest of the characters put together—to serve his drinks in a folksy manner. There was something blindingly offensive about that image, and while this was a rich man forcing his own affectations on himself and not some poor, ambitious Black man, it was still dishonest in a way that made Hawk long for a bath. And now she tried to think of something, anything, that she could say right now. It didn't matter what she said, only that Kaiser did not get the first word. She knew instinctively that this would be like a man seizing the helm of a ship; she didn't want to go where Kaiser pointed. But words were suddenly fleeting. She couldn't—

"Left the bullies at home, I see," Alex said. And then, as if it meant something, he laid a finger beside his nose. Dragged it down.

"The Sting," Kaiser said. He looked like he'd eaten a lemon. "Something more in your vein than mine."

"I dunno. Us rattlesnakes tend to be real good at spotting our own. You set me and my wife up to die. You don't want me playing with your rich ass like a cat with a mouse, you don't try to kill one of the very few people I care about." Alex said.

Kaiser bristled, gathering himself in a way that made Hawk nervous. It made her concerned, the way harmonic tremors concern a geologist. Disaster coming, building...and then fading, as Kaiser's shoulder's suddenly slumped. Except she didn't quite trust that. Shades of her mother, maybe. Rage doesn't fade when you realize you're wrong; it grows hotter. "I'm sorry," he said. "The plan was to stop you two before you got too close. But you should have started feeling ill before you reached anything lethal."

"The way Elizabeth Cummings felt ill? Or her daughter?" Alex said. This got a sharp look from Hawk. He shrugged. "She's alive. She's pretty sick. That's all I got her to tell me before somebody came and took the phone away from her."

He was bluffing. Hawk knew the tells. He was a very good liar, so the tells were small. A tremble in a finger—Alex spoke with his hands. He lied with stillness—a soft increase in blinking that was swiftly repressed.

Kaiser's reaction was swift and immediate. Anger, repressed from earlier and compacted by pause into the heart of a star, flooded across his face. He darkened to the point of apoplexy. She thought maybe she ought to call somebody. A billionaire was about to drop dead on her friend's lawn. "God damn that woman. How can one woman do so much goddamn damage with one phone call? She called you, she called the CDC, she called..." he trailed off. "You didn't call her, and she didn't call you. You little shit."

"Hey. What's the difference between that and—" Alex was watching Hawk.

"You don't need the joke," Hawk said.

Because he'd done that on purpose.

There was a movie that both the Wests liked: Leap of Faith, starring Steve Martin. In the climatic scene, the con-artist revival preacher—an oxymoron, Alex assured her—witnesses a true miracle, and becomes pissed. In a speech that resonated with its own truth, the con artist rants about how the one thing he feared was the one thing that had just happened—the genuine article appeared, and ended all his fun. Because no con can survive having the genuine article appear inside of it. Real medicine, when you're selling snake oil. A real miracle, when you're selling a false god. And here he was. The real Kaiser Willheim. It made his folksy garb, his cool boss persona both look cheap as wooden nickels.

The joke was actually a code: What's the difference between that and aluminum siding? There was a scene earlier in the movie where the con-preacher's crew all makes bets that he can't work their absurd words into his sermon, and his girlfriend's choice was aluminum siding.

"Joke?" Kaiser said.

"In-joke. All families have them." Hawk said. "There's just a time and a place for them, and this isn't it." And that was a lie, but she knew Alex would read her better than she could read him. Her real reasoning lay behind their need for a code...and how they might need to say something like he's a fake in front of Willheim.

Alex shrugged, finally inscrutable. Well...she just had to trust her husband. If it was important, he'd find a way to let her know. "So you were going to...what?" She said, instead. "Stop us when we started puking?"

"Yes. Except you were supposed to reach that point before you reached the Glass Line. Hell, you were supposed to start getting sick about the place where the dead animals show up."

"The Mammal Line," Hawk murmured.

"Exactly, Mrs. West. You're one smart cookie."

And you're dividing and conquering. Hawk glared. Alex glared harder. He repeated, slowly and clearly, "You set me and my wife up to die, Willheim."

A sigh. And a slump of the shoulders that, for once, did not feel theatrical. "Yes. And you aren't. So let me finish off your picture of me as a terrible human being and ask you two...how? How the hell are you two still alive?"

And there was no theater here. His eyes, large and round as lenses, seemed to take in their presence like rare perfume. He seemed to almost quiver with the passion behind that gentle how? And the barb in his sentence stung. Your picture of me as a terrible human being. She wanted to step forward and reassure him, no, he's a fine human being. But she couldn't bring herself to subterfuge at that depth. Instead, she said, "As far as answers to questions go, Mr. Willheim...you first."

He was quiet. She was willing to bet on what was going through his mind. She'd watch Alex spring this trap on people before; he'd never left this to her, though. Maybe it was because Kaiser was on guard with Alex. He didn't seem to give snot for Hawk, save for as a way to get under Alex's skin.

He met her eyes, and she wanted to meet his. She wanted to look him in the eye and hold it. She wanted to watch him choose to fold. Because that's where this was going. It hadn't been, before. Because he hadn't known Hawk and Alex were alive, before, he hadn't come prepared for them. He'd come armed for Emile, maybe—and Hawk suddenly knew that was the reason for the good-old-boy garb—but he'd known the Wests were dead, the way he knew the sun would rise tomorrow...or, better, the way Hawk had known that radioactive emergencies couldn't just explode, full bloom, into an old woman's back yard. Now he was caught, flat footed, and the information he really wanted was safely locked up in Hawk and Alex's heads...and safely in a terrarium inside of Emile's home. He was going to have to play the game on their terms, for now. They'd done it. Inadvertently, but they'd done it. They'd treed the King of Tech the way one would an opossum.

And he'd never been so dangerous as he was, right now.

He turned to Emile. "Can I come in, M—" his lips pressed into the M, and Hawk stepped in front of her friend and continued to glare. If possible, she glared harder. "Dr. Yong." He finished. The words seemed to limp.

There were glares, and then there was the rapier-bright expression Emile turned on Willheim. Take three parts incandescent rage, two parts despair, add a seasoning of amusement, and cap it all off with an anarchist's love for throwing lit objects, and you'd be in the ballpark. Profanity in its purest form might touch it. Mere words would just fail at the ascent. "We can't argue in this fucking heat," they said, and stormed inside without another word.

Kaiser stared after them, mouth slightly agape. "Did...did I somehow offend—"

"Knock it the fuck off, Willheim. You almost called them 'Miss' on purpose. And that's all the invitation anybody gets." Alex added, and followed after his friend.

And Hawk knew it was her cue to leave too.

Sometimes you have to leave the bait alone to get your mark to swallow it whole.