“Some of us in the managerial class have raised questions about you,” he said at last. “When you submitted to surgery, those voices were largely silenced. And now that we’re only hours away from—final events, the question is moot. But over time I’ve come to think of myself as your friend.” (He believed what he was saying.) “And as your friend it’s been a pleasure to watch you moving toward a real alignment with Vox. You’re almost there. It’s perfectly obvious. But you persist in hesitating, almost as if you were frightened of us.” He cocked his head. “Are you frightened of us?”

The truth. “Yes,” I said.

“Vox isn’t just a polity. It’s a state of being. You feel that, don’t you?”

He was drawing a distinction between understanding and feeling, between the fact and my experience of it. “I do feel it,” I said. Also true. I felt it because of what was happening inside my head. The medics had explained this to me. There was a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, not strictly part of the limbic system. It modulated moral judgment, and it was the last area the node would infiltrate and manipulate. I said, “It feels like … well, like standing on the porch of a house on a winter night. There are people inside, and in a way they’re family…”

Oscar liked that: he beamed and smiled.

“But I can’t shake the thought that if I cross that door I won’t be welcome. Because they’ll know me for what I am.”

“What are you?”

“Different. Foreign. Ugly. Hateful.”

“Different in your history, but not in any way that matters.”

“You’re wrong about that, Oscar.”

“Am I? You can’t be sure until you let us know you.”

“I don’t want to be known.”

“Whatever it is you’re hiding from us, I promise it won’t make a difference to Vox.”

“What I’m saying, Oscar, is that I’m not an innocent man.”

“None of us is innocent.”

“I’m a murderer,” I said.

All true.

*   *   *

The burning man in his aura of blue fire:

I killed him because I was angry, because I was humiliated, or maybe just because a storm had blown through Houston on the heels of a record heat wave. Maybe there’s no point asking why.

In the dark, as oily rain sheeted off rooftops and plunged down gutters, I walked along an empty back street carrying a jug of methyl hydrate in a plastic bag. In my right pocket I had a box of matches, also wrapped in plastic, and, for insurance, a butane lighter the store clerk had told me was waterproof.