“What does this have to do with the case before us?” said Carl.

“Give me a minute and you’ll see,” said Donny. “Heather, please just tell us. Did you help the cell that kidnapped your family?”

Heather looked at Donny with a different kind of scorn. “Yes,” she said.

“You told them the information they needed about how to get into the club, where and when they would find their targets, things like that.”

She nodded.

“You had been aligned with the underground for a long time,” said Donny.

“Have you been to that place? The ‘refuge’?” You could hear the scare quotes in her voice.

“I never got invited,” said Donny. “But I know people who have. They say it’s like the Garden of Eden.”

“An Eden where they slaughter the animals. That place needed to be liberated.”

“Did you know they were going to take hostages?”

“No,” said Heather. “They told me they just wanted to arrest my uncle, for crimes against the people. He worked for the administration.”

“That’s your dad’s brother.”

“Yes.” You could see she was keeping the feelings bottled, trying to maintain her strength.

“That’s what your friends in the cell told you.”

“Friend,” said Heather. “Singular.”

“Was it Slider?”

She nodded.

“Did he betray you?”

“No,” said Heather. “It just got out of control. Other people on the team that he hadn’t worked with before. He wasn’t even there—he was running the boat, out there in the water. They were supposed to just take Uncle Bob, bring him back here. But the weather turned on them. A storm was coming in. So they improvised. And then the feds caught up with them.”

“Did you see it all?”

“Just some of it,” said Heather.

“I’m sorry about your mom,” said Donny.

“So am I,” said Heather. She was crying, but lucid. “I loved her. But I also had come to see how corrupted she was, by her fortune.”

“Your fortune,” corrected Donny.

“I disclaim it,” said Heather. “I don’t want it. And I proved that by disclaiming my whole family.”

She had the crowd’s attention.

“That’s very brave,” said Donny.

“Is that what you think?” she said, reddening. “Fuck you. What do you know about courage? Fucking lawyer, presuming to stand there and talk to me like some professor or priest or patriarch who thinks he knows what’s good for us. Don’t you get it? The world is dying, Donny.” She said it like a derisive nickname. “To save it, to save the future, we need to take radical action.”

“More radical than even the elders of this rather radical community are willing to take,” said Donny.

“That’s right. And we’re just getting started. The only real problem this planet has is people. And that’s an easy problem to fix.”

“Is that what you and Slider were working on?”