(I remember that, too. “Tripwire.” A word I’d never heard before he used it. Why did he use that word? It fascinated me. While teaching at Blythe, I used the term in connection with the Silence. Had the Silence been caused by some kind of triggering of a “tripwire,” a set of circumstances under which the gray caps thought they could activate their Machine successfully? If so, what particular stimuli might have come into play? Could we predict when another such attempt might be made? And yet, even after the most minute study of ancient almanacs, historical accounts, the works of a number of statisticians such as Marmy Gort, and anything else we could lay our hands on, I still could not divine those finite, measurable values that might have created the ideal conditions. I concluded that the gray caps’ extraordinary ability to collect information, coupled with their additional spore-based senses, made it unlikely that we would ever be able to know. This did not stop me from continuing to try. Or continuing to ask the most important question: why build a Machine? And what—exactly—did it do?)

We were to find out during the Festival of the Freshwater Squid that year just what happened when Ambergris collectively sprung a tripwire. For the bad Festival was like the antithesis of the Silence, sent to convince us that any semblance of law in the city was illusory, that it could not truly exist, whether we thought it resided in the palm of an obese, elderly Hoegbotton, a thin, ancient Frankwrithe, or the wizened visage of a Kalif none of us had ever seen.

The night of the Festival, the sun set red over the River Moth. Most of the crepe paper lanterns that people had set out had already been crushed by rubble or by the motored vehicles of opposing forces. The Kalif’s men had stepped up their bombardment of the city from without. They made no pretense anymore of aiming at anything in particular, their bombs as likely to crack open a hospital ward as a Hoegbotton sentry post. Really, it was as random as a heart attack. Why worry about what you cannot defend against? So we walked the streets as calmly as we had before the war, when we hadn’t been hunkered down against threats like a fungal bullet to the brain from some trigger-happy F&L recruit.

No, gunfire couldn’t get to me. What terrified me as I looked out from my apartment at dusk was the proliferation of red flags.

On the way back from our journalistic assignments that day, before we turned in our now infamous “The Kalif Yearns for Every Ambergrisian’s Head” article, the flags of the gray caps had appeared in multitudes—rhapsodies of red that seemed, like the ever-present fungus, always on the verge of forming some pattern, some message, only to fall apart into chaos again.