Letitia made a quick phone call in between reports to somebody else in the Cleanup Crew and they let her know the story they’re going with. A series of minor earthquakes ruptured gas lines all over the city. One went off and the others followed. I don’t know how they’re going to back it up, but at least they’re not trying to blame it on terrorists. This city has enough problems without everybody panicking over that, too.

Sastre’s involvement is going to be scrubbed. When Chu said he’d gotten the file out to the masses, it was all horseshit. Only a few people know she was involved at all, and now there’s not even a body.

“How you holding up?” Letitia says, wandering over to me. As she gets closer, everybody else stops paying attention to her, too. I pushed a lot of juice into this sticker.

My left hand is a throbbing mess and blood is starting to seep through the bandage. The Xylocaine wore off hours ago and it’s taking a lot to push the pain away. Every conceivable surface of my body inside and out hurts. I’m bone-tired. I want to sleep. I’m not sure I want to wake up again.

“Fantastic,” I say. She gives me a sidelong glance—it’s obvious bullshit even if she wasn’t a walking lie detector, but she doesn’t question it.

“You want to get out of here?”

“The powers that be are letting you go?”

“They’ve got my report. It’s one of the more prominent ones—losing chunks of two freeways and an interchange kind of gets attention—but it’s only one of thousands right now. Cleanup Crew will leak my name to the press and it’ll be a shitshow for a while, but it’ll give us more control of the situation.”

“And me?”

“With that thing on your chest? Put any more magic into it and people will forget you exist.”

“Not a bad idea.”

“Yeah, right. Come on. I want to go see my wife. And you need to get that hand looked at.”

In the car, a different Crown Vic that hasn’t been through so much punishment, Letitia calls ahead to Gabriela’s warehouse. We take surface streets and even with the sirens and lights it’s slow going. Culver City to East L.A. is a parking lot of panicked drivers, emergency vehicles, burning cars.

And then there are the fires. Some streets are blocked off because every building on both sides is a massive block-long blaze. The fire crews have stopped trying to put them out, and instead are letting them burn. Some of the taller ones are a lost cause, and the most the crews do is keep people out of the way of falling debris.