What was weird to Donny about all this was how much the guys gravitated to the Spartans. As if they owned the future. Maybe it was because America had developed such a Sparta fetish in those days, at least among guys of a certain flesh tone, that they brought that preference with them. Donny liked the Atlanteans, though, with their trees inside the temples and mythical wild animals roaming the streets like furry neighbors and their magic spells and their libraries without end. The Spartans were so corporate, the little warlord band that wanted to raid and pillage and run the world. And it was the Spartans, with their machines, who pissed off Poseidon. Atlantis just happened to be in the way. And then the Spartans had the last laugh, when their horsebots showed they could transform into seahorses and carry their warriors to safety.

Lecker’s people had arranged a charter flight for Donny on a small-engine prop charter out of Baton Rouge. The idea was that he would be returning with Heather. Things had not quite worked out as planned.

As he looked out the window in the back of the little six-seater, engines rattling so loud you would hardly be able to hear your own voice if you tried to talk to the person next to you, Donny thought about how life never quite lived up to the version they storyboarded for you when they told you what to expect. Whether your own life, or the life of the people. Like what America actually did with the promise of a bountiful wilderness that had survived into the so-called Age of Enlightenment without being marred by the imprint of human engineers and architects and extractors, the way the landscape was that he saw out the window. The way the stories of valor and honor and love of the land usually masked not-so-secret histories of conquest and cheating and exploitation. The way his own desire to try to do something reasonably good with the particular tools life had bequeathed him more often than not caused him to fuck everything up for the people he cared about.