Kaveh had never experienced the preferred amygdaline mode of travel before, having only seen it in the form of what looked like a huge puddle of mercury on the ground at Pershing Square. It felt like being shrink-wrapped and put in sleep mode, like a laptop. One moment he was in his New York apartment, the next he was in the desert.

After he got his bearings, he released a consternated sigh upon realizing where he was. Even in the darkness, he could tell he was back in California, but not, like, the good part of California. The air was too clear, the sky too visible, and there was a disquieting lack of smog in the air. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he could see that they were on some sort of complex, perhaps an ex-government complex, as there was no power anywhere. It looked abandoned.

“Where are we?”

“34°35′36.4″ NORTH, 117°23′05.2″ WEST.”

“I mean, what municipality are we in? Or at least what county?”

“SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY. MUNICIPALITY OF VICTORVILLE.”

Kaveh had to hand it to him; if he were to go into hiding, he probably would pick an abject shithole like Victorville. He looked over his shoulder, half expecting to see a group of squatters huddled around a fire burning out of a metal trash can. The only place worse he could imagine to hole up was Bakersfield.

Nikola led him to the entrance of a midsize airplane hangar, perhaps one built for private jets or Cessnas. He’d expected to enter into complete darkness, but once inside, he saw that Nikola had constructed a massive wall of television screens right in the middle of the building, a hodgepodge surveillance wall the size of a small billboard. Human-made television screens, and new LED flat-screens at that. A full half of them were tuned to news networks, every single twenty-four-hour one in the United States, as well as what appeared to be most if not all the major international ones as well—the BBC, Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera English, CCTV, and so on. The rest appeared to be security feeds.

“What the hell is this?” he breathed, stumbling toward the wall of talking heads, which had no sound coming out of it.

“Kaveh?”

He dashed toward the source of the voice, which was coming from the other side of a portable airplane stair that was functioning like a wall, and there she was.