“Talking to Roland,” Manny said. “He agreed to help, by the way. He’s going to fight.”

Donald Farris’s smile turned into a frown. Manny hadn’t been expecting that.

“How did you do it?” he asked in a somber, grave voice.

“We just talked for a while,” Manny said. “He explained why he didn’t want to fight. It sounded very reasonable…” Manny paused, and then made the choice to lie just a little. “I wasn’t trying to change his mind. I didn’t ask him to help.” That last part was true, at least. “I do feel bad, though. I’m sure he changed his mind because of me.”

“Is it really on you if he chooses to fight?” Sasha asked. “I killed two men. Both of those deaths are on me. But you didn’t order Roland to do anything.”

“No,” Donald Farris agreed, “but I doubt Roland would’ve made the decision to intervene if Manny hadn’t pressed.”

“That’s probably true,” Manny admitted.

Donald looked from Manny to Sasha.

“There’s a war ritual, peculiar to the men and women and whatevers of this community. I think you’d benefit from seeing it.”

“A ritual?” Sasha asked.

“Not a religious one, I assure you. But yes. They call it their war ritual.” He extended a hand out to the field around Rolling Fuck. Manny looked out at it for the first time since coming out here and realized that people seemed to be packing up.

“Right now,” Donald said, “the citizens are packing up their tents and their RVs and preparing the city for departure. It’s moving out with their army. They’ll drive that thing,” he jerked a thumb in the direction of the City of Wheels, “right up to the damn battlefield. It’ll be behind them the whole time they’re fighting. I think they stole the idea from the ancient Celts.”

“Anyway,” he said, “once the city is in position, they’ll open up these little boxes that look quite a lot like bee hives and they’ll let out a swarm of about a thousand little drones. Those’re mostly just facial-recognition cameras attached to wings and a wee engine. They’ll record everything and send data on the faces of every enemy fighter to a central computer in the city.”

“What good does that do?” Manny asked.

“It gives us a chance to identify those men, or women, so we can scrape their social media profiles and display pictures and videos from their lives, once they die. The whole city, everyone who isn’t fighting, turns out to watch that.”

“That sounds fucking terrible,” Manny said. “What do we gain from watching the home movies of dead men?”

“A memorial.”

Manny didn’t understand, but he could see that Donald Farris was revving himself up for an involved explanation. He let the old man talk.