Coincidentally or not, they had reached the center of town and pulled up in front of one of the larger buildings, a former bank that was now the local offices of ONE: the Organization for New Eschatology. Sophia had been sharing her location with family members and apparently Jake had passed the word to the local staff, and so a few people, whom Sophia could only assume were professional eschatologists, or perhaps eschatological support staff, were emerging from the building’s grand old doors to greet their colleague. “Here is where I leave you,” said Enoch. “Thank you for helping take me down from that cross and for bringing me this far.”

Part 4

Part 4

Chapter 17

Chapter 17

With her husband, Csongor, Zula still lived in the same condo where they had dwelled at the time of Richard’s death. They had raised Sophia there. Upon sending her off to Princeton, they had shopped around for a new place but decided that the condo—two thousand square feet on the eighteenth floor of a twenty-story building in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood—still suited them just fine.

Richard had bought it for them a long time ago, in the aftermath of events that had made them briefly famous and placed them at some hazard of violent reprisals. They could not safely go back to their homes, which were easily findable, and they had no money to speak of. Richard had eliminated the problem by setting up an untraceable shell company and using it to purchase the condo. By the time the Miasma had caught up with the ruse and figured out where they lived, they were no longer all that famous, and the existing security in the building had proved adequate to their needs.

Security was, though, an ongoing rock-paper-scissors match between technologies that all seemed to want different things. The lobby of the building, its elevators and stairwells, and its exterior belts of walkways and gardens had all been covered by security cameras from the very beginning of Zula and Csongor’s tenancy. In those days a security guard would sit all day behind a reception desk in the lobby, keeping an eye on the main entrance, glancing down from time to time at an array of flat-panel monitors that showed him the feeds from those cameras. But the desk had been torn out some years ago and replaced with a big saltwater aquarium. The building still employed a security firm. But those guards who were human, and who were actually on site, spent most of the day up on their feet, strolling about the property while keeping track of events in wearable devices. Some of the “guards” were just algorithms, analyzing video and audio feeds for suspicious behavior, recognizing faces and cross-checking them against a whitelist of residents, friends, and neighbors, and a blacklist of predators, stalkers, and ex-husbands. Anything ambiguous was forwarded to a Southeast Asian eyeball farm.