Arnie nodded, thinking, Don’t cry. “We lost good people. We did learn a lot about Daybreak.” He looked down at his notes. “Everyone ready?”
They all nodded.
“Then,” Arnie said, “do you feel like you joined Daybreak after it already existed, or do you feel like you helped create it?”
“Joined,” Beth said, simultaneously with Jason’s “Helped create,” and they both laughed.
“I’m not seeing the joke,” Arnie said.
“We heard about it on the same day from a guy named Terrel,” Beth said. “Ysabel was in a long time before we were, so—”
Ysabel screamed and fell from her chair, lying on the floor with her back arched and arms flailing. They had all seen this before; whatever part of Daybreak clung to individual minds, it still protected Daybreak. They cleared the chairs away, and surrounded her with pillows.
Beth said, “Well, Arnie, you sure hit a button that time.”
Arnie said, “Yeah, I guess so. How are you two doing?”
“Little bit of a headache,” Jason said, “but that could be all the screaming and the exercise.”
Beth nodded. “I’m okay. I can feel Daybreak not liking me but… I don’t know, maybe I just have more natural resistance. It was deep into Ysabel, here. Real deep. So fuckin’ much more Daybreak in her than we got in us, you know?”
“Keep telling me, I’m learning.”
She shrugged. “We used to kid around and call it Daydar, you know, like gaydar? One Daybreaker tends to know another one real fast and easy, and know how deep in they are and how long they’ve been. Some of those real long-timers it’s like they’re all Daybreak, ain’t much of them left, it’s like you’re talking to Daybreak direct without them there at all.”
“And we used to laugh at coustajam hippies,” Jason added. “People who liked the music, the vegetables, the clothes, and some of the words, but didn’t have a clue what it meant. You got so you knew the second you met someone.”
“Can someone who wasn’t a Daybreaker have Daydar?”
Beth looked thoughtful for a moment. “Well, most straight people have some gaydar, don’t they?”
Izzy sighed and turned over on her side. Arnie made sure she was covered with a blanket. “She’ll want to sleep it off, and sometimes the easiest time to talk is right when she’s just coming out. I can sit here and wait for her, if you both have things to do.”
“I think I better stay,” Beth said. “She’s kind of… she gets scared when it’s just you there when she wakes up. She told us. Don’t get your feelings hurt or nothing, I’m just saying.”
Arnie nodded. “Okay.” Not sure what else to say, he added, “I’m sorry I’m scary.”
Beth shrugged. “Not scary so much… just, it’s your job, Arnie, you got to push us, hurt us even, to find out about Daybreak—maybe you’ll feel real bad after, but you’ll hurt us.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, uselessly, again.
“It’s okay,” Jason said. “Better that it’s you; at least we can tell you don’t like having to hurt us.”
Arnie nodded. Wow. Daydar. And how Daybreak came into existence or how people get infected is a third-rail question. More stuff to try on Aaron. Get one definite thing out of him, and Heather will be able to go straight to everyone for funds, people, and time—they’ll all have to listen.
THE NEXT DAY. NEAR PINEHURST, IDAHO, ON US ROUTE 95. 3:45 PM PST. FRIDAY, JULY 18, 2025.
The shadows were getting longer, stretching eastward, but sunset was still hours away. Bambi and Debbie had spent the day holding hands or leaning against each other, squeeze-coding, catching up on everything. Bambi found Debbie’s enthusiasm for tonight’s raid frightening. But then if I’d been chained for three months between bouts of scutwork and rape—
The door opened. Debbie slumped like a collapsing sandbag. Michael Amandasson ordered, “Slave, come with me.”
Debbie wailed, “Please don’t tie me up with the horses again, I’ll try to be better!”
“We’re not going to do that—”
“Please, not in the kennel with the dogs!”
Michael Amandasson laughed. “You’re coming to my private cabin. I have a one-fourth share in the ransom and I’m gonna celebrate.”
Debbie stood up, snuffling, wiping her face, catching her balance on Bambi Castro’s shoulder. Bambi covered Debbie’s hand with her own, gave her a brief consoling hug, and squeezed QSL QTH—I have received your position.
ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 6:12 PM MST. FRIDAY, JULY 18, 2025.
After they had sparred with fists and feet, taken wooden knives away from each other, slammed each other into the mats, and tried to hit each other with sticks, Mr. Samson (“Call me sensei and I’ll kick your butt, call me Master and I’ll make you shine my shoes”) seemed satisfied. “Well, yeah, you definitely have enough prior training for my advanced class. What do you think, Steve?”
Steve Ecco, a short, muscular man, perhaps thirty years old, with sandy blond hair and a Wyatt Earp mustache, nodded. “Good with me too. Where’d you learn?”
Arnie Yang explained, “Well, Dad pushed me to do all this martial arts stuff, so I did, like I did classical guitar, AP math, Junior Achievement, and all the rest. I was a total GOAT.”
Ecco raised an eyebrow. “The only goats we had in Oklahoma were next to the doublewides of the goat-ropers.”
Arnie laughed. “Yeah, different cultures. Grossly Overachieving Asian Teenager. One of those Asian kids who was pushed and pushed and pushed. I hated it in high school—if you’re an Asian kid who does martial arts, every moron in the world is yelling ‘hee-yah!’ and jumping at you. But when I got to college, I learned the stress relief value of beating on your fellow human beings, and just kind of stayed with it after college. Nowadays it almost seems easier to practice than not.”
Samson nodded. “Good answer. We get too many people here, even now, who want to be either a crime-fighting macho superhero who rips human hearts out with his bare hands, or a Jedi Peacenik Levitation Master who just floats bad people away in harmony with their spiritual nature.”
“I’ve met a few of both kinds, myself. I hope I’m old enough to be over the romanticism of violence. You know, less than a week ago I shot some people, and a good friend was killed beside me. I know I have a Ph.D. and I use big words, but I hope you can overlook those character defects.”
“You’ll do fine here,” Samson said. He was tall, stout but not fat, with thick, straight, iron-gray hair, an eagle-beak of a nose, crooked teeth, and a receding chin, so that he looked like a large muskrat who had borrowed a Senate candidate’s toupee.
“Be nice to have another guy in the class who knows something,” Ecco added. “The advanced class’ll be coming in in a couple minutes, get some water now if you’re gonna need it.”
After a brisk workout and some fussing with people’s grips in jujitsu, Samson called Jason up for sparring. As they stepped into striking range, Samson sped up and kept coming, swinging slowly and carefully but pushing Jason steadily back until his foot crossed the painted line. “Okay, I ran you out of bounds. In a big room I’d have you cornered, and be beating on you or waiting for my friends to bring around a weapon. What did you do?”
“He didn’t get off the line.” It sounded more like lann, delivered in a flat twang of complete boredom.