She had brought her bag with her. Tucked into the end pocket was a folding multitool—a going-to-college gift from her uncle Jake. This detail empowered her, somehow, to do what she did after she was finished on the toilet, which was to crawl into the shower stall on hands and knees and get the blade of the knife under the edge of a nonslip daisy—the best preserved of all the specimens, only one of three that still had all of its petals, not directly visible from the toilet, bettering her odds of getting away clean. With care and patience born of insomnia she pried up each of the petals, one at a time, exposing fiberglass that had not seen light since the Vietnam War. Then she worried the circular middle loose. Finally it came free and she gazed at it delightedly on the palm of her hand; it was limned in grime rich with Forthrast biomass, smelling faintly of Comet. The rest of Uncle Richard’s DNA might have been reduced to water vapor and air by the ion-beam scanner, but perhaps traces of it were still embedded in the slip-proof porosities of this artifact. She doubted she would ever make any practical use of it as genetic material, but it did make for a nice souvenir.

Chapter 15

Chapter 15

Lovely people, but the weird was strong in that place,” Phil announced as the town receded in the Land Cruiser’s rearview mirror the next morning. He had swapped places with Anne-Solenne and was now riding shotgun, the better to see Tom and Kevin’s pickup truck. During the night, Tom and Kevin had opened up the locker in its back, taken out the machine gun, and mounted it on the tripod. They’d kept it under a blue tarp until the caravan had got out of town, then pulled over onto the shoulder long enough for Kevin to hop out, remove the tarp, and take a seat atop the locker. For the time being, the barrel was still canted sharply upward and Kevin was keeping his hands off the controls. Apparently the sole point of all this was to make everyone in their vicinity aware that they were a hard target.

“Mmm,” Sophia answered.

“Is this an okay time to talk about the finer points of estate law?” Anne-Solenne asked, swiveling around to cast a significant look behind them. Just a couple of car lengths to their rear, Pete’s SUV loomed. Pete was driving. Most of its seats were occupied by men—a mix of extended family and servants—who were open-carrying a range of long and short guns. “Just so I have a basic TLDR-level grasp of the weirdness? Because those people are super nice and everything but I can tell that you are dancing through a minefield.”