Some swivel in Seymour has locked: he can no longer see the planet as anything but dying, and everyone around him complicit in the killing. The people in the Eden’s Gate houses fill their trash cans and pilot SUVs between their two homes and play music on Bluetooth speakers in their backyards and tell themselves they’re good people, conducting honorable, decent lives, living the so-called dream—as though America were an Eden where God’s warm benevolence fell equally across every soul. When in truth they’re participating in a pyramid scheme that’s chewing up everybody at the bottom, people like his mother. And they’re all congratulating themselves for it.

• MATHILDA: sorry im late we only use terminals at night when chores are done
• SEEMORE6: what chores
• MATHILDA: planting pruning cutting hauling harvesting preparing pickling
• SEEMORE6: vegetables?
• MATHILDA: ya super fresh
• SEEMORE6: don’t rly love vegetables
• MATHILDA: tonight all the trees are standing up big and straight around camp so beautiful
• MATHILDA: sky purple like eggplant
• SEEMORE6: another vegetable
• MATHILDA: ha u r funny
• SEEMORE6: where do u sleep? tents
• MATHILDA: tents ya also cabins barracks
• MATHILDA:…
• SEEMORE6: u still there
• MATHILDA: they just said I could have ten xtra minutes
• MATHILDA: because u are special u are important u have promise
• SEEMORE6: me?
• MATHILDA: ya not just to them to me
• MATHILDA: to every1
• SEEMORE6:…
• MATHILDA: night birds flying over greenhouse creek trickling full tummy good feeling
• SEEMORE6: wish I was there
• MATHILDA: u will love it even the veggies ha ha
• MATHILDA: we have showerhouse rec room armory plus beds are comfy too
• SEEMORE6: real beds or sleeping bags
• MATHILDA: both
• SEEMORE6: is it like boys in one place girls in other?
• MATHILDA: its whatever we want we don’t follow the old ways
• MATHILDA: u will sees
• MATHILDA: soon as u do your task

During classes his eyes cloud with visions of Bishop’s camp. White tents beneath dark trees, machine-gun nests atop stockades, gardens and greenhouses, solar panels, men and women in fatigues singing songs, telling tales, mysterious brewmasters brewing healthy elixirs from forest herbs. Always the imagination rotates back to Mathilda: her wrists, her hair, the intersection of her thighs. She comes down a path carrying two pails of berries; she is blond, she is Japanese, Serbian, a Fijian skin diver with ammunition belts crisscrossing over her breasts.

• MATHILDA: u will feel so much better after you act
• SEEMORE6: all the girls here are clueless
• SEEMORE6: none of them get me
• MATHILDA: u will feel so much power
• SEEMORE6: none of them r like u