Shoulder-to-shoulder with other staff, I couldn’t tear my eyes from the overhead screen in the Theater where four vehicles ripped from a post-apocalyptic survival thriller plowed through the desert. A beat-up black van, two jeeps, and a black pickup rumbled down the same road that me and Yusuf had driven on the way back from the observatory just hours before. One of the jeeps actually had a steer skull mounted to its grill.

Kaori’s tight voice had blasted through the PA system in the Compound and over the green-painted pavement of our cookie-cutter houses, ripping us all from sleep before dawn. Code bravo bravo bravo. All staff to the Theater.

“We’ve been warned that some people are coming,” Kaori said, even-voiced and straight-backed. “And that they’re angry.”

What freaked me out the most was the total silence in the Theater. Only the breaths of the people around me as Kaori’s words died in the air, in front of security footage and the growing crowd.

The surge of my pulse at the side of my neck was a silent alarm. Well, we’re doomed, the Storyteller voice deadpanned. I’ll just see myself out.

We could fight about how later, once we were safe. Finger-pointing at how Kaori baited the fringe crazies with how open she was to the public, or with the insane price of the n-Viz pre-registration. Or bringing that sponsor here, who’d stormed out because of whatever the Envisioner had told him. Or me and Yusuf’s leak to the tipster board.

What mattered now was that the Commonwealth of Great Basin Nations had no standing army and couldn’t guarantee the safety of the Compound. And that my skeleton was trying to vibrate out of my body. The security drones were already zipping out to meet the group, who picked them off like clay pigeons, causing the screens around the Theater to dissolve into static. By my side towards the front of the crowd, I watched Yusuf’s lips move—Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Local Interstellar Cloud—as he fell back into his ordering.

“We got word from the Nations border that a couple of civilian vehicles blew past,” Kaori said. “It’s just idiots with torches and pitchforks who don’t like when other kids on the playground have toys that they don’t.”

“How many?” someone at the front of the crowd shouted.

Another white coat leaned towards Yusuf and whispered, with me close enough that I heard something about perimeter cams.

“The security detail is rolling out,” Kaori said. “They’ll stop our visitors before they get anywhere close.”

“And if they don’t?”