“Yes. His nonprofit.” Unsaid by Pete, because Sophia was the last person on earth to whom it needed to be explained, was that the entire financial empire over which Pete presided on behalf of Alice’s estate, vast as it was, was actually somewhat smaller than that controlled by Jake. Dodge’s estate had been split down the middle between them. But whereas Pete invested his half in utilities and real estate, Jake put his money into weird bot-controlled investment vehicles that reputedly brought a higher rate of return. He appeared to spend a lot of the proceeds on the nonprofit known as ONE, which was his way of wrestling with matters religious and spiritual. Before suddenly becoming a billionaire he had lived in a compound in northern Idaho and practiced a fringy kind of Christianity; since then, he had been reaching out and talking to all kinds of people who held beliefs of varying levels of weirdness. On the whole, it felt like he was becoming more sane over time, which was good as far as it went. But the way Pete had said You know that Jake has this ONE thing caused Sophia to brace herself for some manner of appallingly strange wacky Jake news.

“Yeah. They have, I guess you could call it an outreach program aimed at the Levitican types. He tries real hard not to use the M-word.”

“M-word?”

“‘Missionaries.’ He feels like he can sort of speak their language a little bit, because of Idaho.”

“Okay.”

“So, now that Jake has sort of come in from the wilderness and started living a more, I don’t know, settled and responsible life, he feels like a legitimate thing for ONE to be doing is to be maintaining some level of contact with some of the weirder sects out there. The people around where we live, even the hard-core Leviticans, you know they come into town to get teeth pulled or what have you, so we have some amount of day-to-day contact with those people. But over there”—he waved his hand vaguely at Nebraska—“some of them have really gone off the deep end.”

“You mean, they have gone off the deep end compared to people who build two-hundred-foot-tall flaming crosses next to the Applebee’s!?” Sophia asked.

“Yeah,” Pete said, laconic for once, allowing Sophia’s imagination to have her way in the ensuing silence. “So believe it or not he knows people through ONE who are actually willing to go into places like that and have conversations with the people there.”

“Or exchange words with them at any rate,” said Sophia, recalling the Red Card.