Thomas found himself setting his teeth in guilt, despite the layers of pharmaceutical lacquer. Mia was a spectator, someone who had tripped on stage from the front row. Only Thomas's firm hand held him in the floodlights. Only Thomas's need. And why should that bind him? This was no natural disaster. There would be no correspondents in rain-slickers, no hands-to-the-ear or teleprompters, no camera-eye to impress. The days of overlapping obligations were long gone. The soft tissue of community had shrunk to the bone of property lines; the world had become a great quilt of demilitarized zones. A circumcision for every heart. A burqa thrown over every window. Neighbors need not care, so long as the grass was cut and the volume was turned low.

Thomas was using Mia, plain and simple. He was banking on the disconnect between love and its evolutionary rationale, the fact that Mia's brain had confused Frankie for someone belonging to the same genetic cooperative. But giving his Number One Neighbor an out simply wasn't an option. Captain Cassidy had given Thomas a White Whale of a mission. Someone had to row while he teetered with the harpoon.

He continued explaining—why they had no choice but to abduct his son, how Neil had given him a specially scrambled phone, how he was supposed to call to find out where to bring Frankie. He answered Mia's subsequent questions with grim patience, like a clinician deciphering the ghosts of cancer on an X-ray.

When Mia asked the question, the question of how he could trust a monster, Thomas simply said, 'Because Frankie's his son.'

His Number One Neighbor said nothing for a long while. The tires hummed, annoyed by the lack of mountains and mud.

Control… Thomas could feel it, a cold and clammy hand wrapped about his limbic system. People weren't heroes, he realized. They just weren't.

Only moments of insanity made them seem that way.

Manhattan towered, serene with distance, surreal with innumerable lights. The nimbus of each formed interlocking rings across the windshield, slowing migrating to the curve of the highway. Somewhere, buried among the clefts in the horizon, a little boy lay strapped to his bed, twitching and screaming.

Thomas rocked in his seat, clutched his knees.

'What if he's right?' he asked. It was one of those questions that only became real in the asking. Part of him, he realized, didn't trust Mia to be alone with his thoughts.

'Who?' Mia replied. 'Neil?'

'We thought we were the center of the universe. We were wrong. We thought we were made in God's image. We were wrong. Now we think we're the source of all meaning… We think that we're real'

'That's just one more perspective,' Mia said. 'One more word game. Look around you, Tom. Nobody has a fucking clue what's going on. Least of all Neil. It's just power plays all the way down.'