The tall, thin man emerged from the shadows. The blanket covering the top and sides of his head, his long curly beard, and his large round eyes made him look like a cheap religious painting. Bare feet gripped the warm summer street above pirate-style pants—a big piece of a sheet wrapped at the waist, cut up to the crotch front and back, and sewed up the inside seam.
Jeez, Arnie thought. With a zillion Wal-Marts out there to loot, he couldn’t just find some all-cotton basketball shorts?
“My name is Aaron,” the man said. “Last fall, you were looking for me with every weapon and tool that plaztatic civilization still had.”
“What are you here for?”
“I’d like to talk to you.”
“Well, talk.” Arnie’s heart was pounding. This guy at least looked like Ysabel’s description of Aaron, who even now was the single most wanted Daybreaker. “Talk,” Arnie repeated. “If that’s what you came to do.”
“Oh, that’s what I came to do, Doctor Yang. Doctor, from the Latin doceo. Taught, educated, having mastered the documents, learned the doctrine, having been indoctrinated.”
“You sound like you used to teach English.”
“I do, don’t I? After I go, will you look up all the missing English teachers to see if you can find a match?”
“Just an observation.” Arnie shifted his weight.
“If people would confine themselves to observations, everything would be fine. It’s their insistence on taking action that condemns the species.”
“You’re one of us.”
“I intend to be among the last of us, actually.” Aaron advanced to just out of arms’ reach. “So you want to see into the soul of Daybreak. Here I am. What do you want to know?”
“How do you communicate with Daybreak?” Arnie asked.
“That’s a rather blunt question.”
“I’m blunt, and I don’t believe you’ll actually tell me the truth about anything. I might as well shoot for the moon.”
“Nowadays, the moon shoots for you. I don’t share my colleagues’ optimism that if you understand Daybreak, you’ll join it. I think there are plenty of unredeemable people.”
“And you don’t have any trouble with killing them.”
Aaron stared at him, head cocked to the side. “So you are a statistical semiotician, an occupation that could have explained immense amounts about culture and society and all that, but in practice was used to refine methods of selling politicians and soap—not very well because no one could get funding for the basic science to underlie it.”
Arnie brought his knives up slightly; he felt like his bowels were trying to pass a frozen cannonball. Aaron’s words were—
“You could have told everyone about Daybreak before it happened, but it was the same old thing, wasn’t it? Give us the payoff from your research, first, and then we’ll pay you to do it. That was where you were last year, eh? You knew Daybreak was coming but they wouldn’t let you really study it unless you told them the answers before you studied it.” Aaron clicked his tongue. “Very tough on Doctor Arnie Yang, they don’t want the doctor, the know-er, the one who makes know-ledge, they want the doctus, the guy who already knows. Give us your results, better yet tell us we’re already right, and then we’ll pay you to do the research.” Aaron was standing close enough now for Arnie to just step forward and strike, his huge dark eyes holding Arnie’s. “And even now, eh?” Aaron said. “Even now, they want you to just tell them what to shoot. They don’t want you to understand Daybreak, do they?”
“How old is Daybreak?”
“Everyone I know, before they were in Daybreak, was in something that eventually flowed into Daybreak,” Aaron said. “You might say Daybreak is older than itself; whatever parts became the core of Daybreak were there before anyone spoke the word ‘Daybreak.’ At first it had many different names: the Coming, the Dawn, the Morning Glory, one goofy guy I knew said, ‘It’s Morning on Earth’ constantly. So I surely heard the word ‘Daybreak’ in that context at least a hundred times before I knew it would be the name of anything, let alone the thing it would be the name of.” Aaron cocked his head to the side, peering at Arnie. “Insightful, but very academic, Doctor Yang. Shouldn’t you ask about our troop dispositions? No wonder no one likes that incorrigibly academic Doctor Yang—”
“If you expect me to be ashamed of my education, you’ve—”
“Oh, but it’s not about education. It’s about understanding. All thinking beings surely want to be understood, don’t they? Consciously or not?” Aaron stepped backward. The shadows closed around him like a slamming door. Arnie was alone in the moonlit street.
Later, at home, he closed and bolted the heavy shutters, checked every bolt and lock multiple times, and stretched out so that his writing pad rested on his stomach and faced the candle. At the top of the page he wrote, Recent contact with an active long-term Daybreaker has provided evidence of the urgency of a full, in-depth, from-the-ground-up study of Daybreak. After ten sentences he realized he couldn’t remember the conversation nearly as well as the eyes, the rhythm, the too-empty street. The creaking of the old house, and the fantastical candlelight shadows, should have terrified him, he thought, just before he fell asleep.
THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 9 AM MST. THURSDAY, JULY 17, 2025.
Arnie’s “interview room” was a corner second-floor office space over a boarded-up computer store in downtown Pueblo. He had furnished it with wool and cotton blankets thrown over metal folding chairs, facing in a semicircle toward an old writing desk, and a side table with pitchers of water and some bread and cheese for snacks.
He sat down at the writing desk and opened his notepad, just as if he hadn’t been gone for more than six weeks. “Well, it’s been a while since we’ve met as a group. I’ve got some new questions; let’s see if they call up any new answers.”
Jason Nemarec, his wife Beth, and Izzy Underhill (who was actually Ysabel Roth, but was still at some risk of being assassinated because of her prominence on Daybreak day) were Arnie’s only “domesticated” ex-Daybreakers—people who had been fully part of Daybreak and were now reliably working for the RRC. The best estimate now was that on October 28, 2024, at least sixty thousand Daybreakers had participated in some act of sabotage within the United States; perhaps a million sympathizers, posers, and dupes had been involved peripherally during the year before.
Most Daybreakers were now dead, like most of everyone else; most of the living ones were in the tribes, but there must still be covert Daybreaker spies and saboteurs, as well as ex-Daybreakers, afraid to expose themselves to arrest or mob violence, hiding out the way Beth and Jason had for months in the little town of Antonito, far from anyone who might recognize them. It was a legitimate fear; every Daybreaker captured in those first months, despite the pleas of Federal intelligence and law enforcement, had been killed by mobs or summarily executed by local authorities. Trying to protect captured Daybreakers long enough to interrogate them simply got police and soldiers killed with them; shortly, most officials began handing Daybreakers over to mobs, or killing them themselves, as a matter of personal safety.
Izzy was petite, bony, and big-jawed, with long straight brown hair and deep sad eyes. “I’m so sorry to hear about what happened down at Mota Elliptica. It must have been terrible,” she said.