'Easy, Goodbook.'

Thomas looked up, uncomprehending.

'Frankie?' he hissed.

'Is mine,' Neil replied.

'And Rip… Rip…'

'The Ripper? She's all yours.'

Thomas could hear them both. 'But Dadeeeee!'

'But-but…' A keening wail escaped him. He blew spit through clenched teeth.

'You're still Frankie's father,' Neil said. 'I know.'

Thomas raised Sam's Glock, aimed at the roaring, looming blur that was his friend.

'Put it down, Goodbook. You need me. You need me because Frankie needs me.'

'N-Nora?' Thomas croaked, jabbing the gun at him. 'She told you?'

Neil seemed utterly unperturbed—terrifyingly so. 'She had the kids tested. But she said she knew all along.'

For some reason, this explanation calmed Thomas. He gazed at his best friend, unable to recognize him, though he could, he was sure, paint photographs of his face. Who was this man, this monster, this friend he knew better than he knew himself?

'My whole life…' He paused, feeling curiously empty. Too much trauma. The breakers had been blown. He felt nothing. 'My whole life's been a lie.'

'Now you're starting to see,' Neil replied.

Desolation as insight. Was that what this was all about? Mortification, not of the body, but of the soul.

'You don't hate me, do you?'

Neil stared without blinking, his eyes button-black in the dingy light. 'No. Never. Not even when I still could.'

'Then all this is about the Argument?'

'Everything is about the Argument, Goodbook. Everything.'

Neil looked biblical in the ensuing silence, angular and statuesque. The man who had transcended the slumber people called consciousness. It seemed impossible that the crimes Thomas had witnessed could be the work of his hand. Impossible and inevitable. Neil had always done this. Moving from rule to sanctity, brushing it all away like so many cobwebs.

'So what happens now?' Thomas asked.

'We save Frankie.'

'But I thought you were past caring. Why should Frankie matter to you?'

'Because he's my son.'

'And that means something to you?'

Neil shot him a curious look. 'Why do you think sex is so pleasurable? It's the way we plug into the future, Goodbook. All that heat. All that juice. You think our genes just magically replicate 2 billion years of information? Sex is survival, man. What you are, who you are, is the product of a million million fuckings. We're fucking machines.'

'What does that have to do with my son?'

Neil shrugged. 'I plugged into Frankie when I impregnated Nora years ago. Frankie's my future, and I'm his past—a billion years of data! My brain's hard-wired to effect his survival'

That phrase, 'impregnated Nora', was like a blow to the gut.

'That's a reason?' Thomas exclaimed.

'You still don't get it, do you? There's no such thing as reasons, Goodbook.'

Thomas felt like spitting. 'Just causes.'