40 MINUTES LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 12:30 PM MST. SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2025.
Since Sumer, the smart and the powerful have always met over food, somewhere discreet, where they can stretch out comfortably and decide what the rest of the world ought to do. Elizabeth I’s ministers traded barbs at the Mermaid; the Founding Fathers argued more freely in the City Tavern than in Independence Hall; atom bomb scientists drank at the Owl. When Washington DC still existed, the too-late decision to expand the Daybreak investigation had been taken in a hole-in-the-wall Cambodian diner belonging to Allie Sok Banh’s uncle.
Nowadays, in Pueblo, Johanna’s What There Is was the place to be well-fed and not overheard.
Johanna charged by the seat and served family style. She didn’t attempt a menu—she couldn’t depend on having any particular ingredient, and the big wood stove and barbecue grill in her improvised backyard cookshed were really only adequate for preparing one large common meal.
Heather and Arnie had barely taken their seats in the Mountain View Room—the most isolated room on the third floor of Johanna’s—when Johanna herself brought in a crisp field-green salad surrounding a chilled trout loaf, and a side of elk ragout over polenta.
It would have been blasphemy to talk business over such a lunch. When they had eaten all of it, Heather said, “Arnie, my problem is when I listen to you, I’m always saying, Yes, sure, the way to get good, balanced, accurate knowledge of anything is to pursue it for its own sake, but when I’m on the radio for any length of time with Cam in Athens, or with Graham in Olympia, I find myself thinking, Right, we’re losing a war here and Arnie’s doing pure science instead of figuring out what to hit and how. And I don’t like being a creature of whatever I heard last. I think you are right. Can you help me settle firmly into your side?”
“I can try. I wish I knew if it even is a war. Originally I thought it wasn’t—I thought Daybreak was more like a storm than an invasion—and then I thought that it was, because a storm doesn’t pick its targets—and now I think Daybreak is just really hard on analogies; it doesn’t behave like anything else, it’s just Daybreak. We won’t understand anything about it till we admit there’s never been anything like it before. But I do understand that we won’t get it, either, if Daybreak takes the world down into a dark age while we’re still trying to understand. We need to know enough to win, soon enough to use it, and right now we don’t even know what it would mean to know that.”
“You could be more reassuring.”
“Yeah, but you wanted the truth, as I see it.”
“I did.” Heather brought her feet up onto the couch where she’d half-sat during the meal. “Oh, man, Johanna knows how to make a room comfortable.” She groaned. “I really wish I could wait to think about this till after I get my body back, but that’s way too long to wait. So, you think the tribes are the key to… well, what are they the key to?”
Arnie spread his hands. “Maybe just to finding the right question. But as for your situation with Larry—look, Heather, this is a gift, not a problem. You’ve got a shrewd investigator who knows the territory, and who wants to look into it. And I can’t show you graphs—”
“I don’t need’em, Arn, I believe in your intuition much more than you do. If you say we have to know about the tribes, then we have to know about the tribes, and I’ll declare that to be Larry’s main mission. The biggest problem I see is that whenever he gets back with Debbie, he might want to spend some time getting reacquainted, I would think, and frankly, as much time as he’s spent in the woods since December, he’s got to be tired. And I don’t think I have anyone more entitled to a vacation if he asks for one.”
Arnie leaned back, thinking. “Well, we need way more than one investigator on the job, anyway, if we want results in time to use them. And though we’ve learned so much from Larry’s exploring the Inland Northwest, that’s kind of like looking under the streetlight for the quarter you dropped in the alley, because the light is better. I think we could learn more from penetrating the Lost Quarter, ideally from a traverse of it.”
“If anybody ever came back after going in,” Heather said.
“Oh yeah,” Arnie said. “Oh yeah, it would definitely depend on that.”
“Apart from some Army scouts who never get ten miles north of the boundary rivers, has anyone come back yet?”
“Not really.” Arnie was looking down at the table. “Two bodies have floated downstream on the Wabash, and one on the James.” He dragged some of the water from around his glass into a long thin line. “Heather, it’s got to be done, it’s dangerous, and it needs to be soon.”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “All right. I’ve got an agent that was going to go out to Pale Bluff, just to see how he did on a milk run. He was going to leave late next week anyway. He’ll be about twenty miles from where the Lost Quarter starts, by the nearest approach. Ex-Army ranger, did mountain man re-creation, martial artist—”
“Is it Steve Ecco or Dan Samson?”
“Ecco. Is there a difference?”
“Not really. They’re both my friends. And I just lost a friend to Daybreak, trying to find out how it works and what it thinks, and I don’t know if I’m ready to lose another one.”
Heather nodded slowly and sadly. “Someday, I hope, RRC will be big enough so that I don’t know and like everyone who works for us. Till then, though, I’m always sending my friends into danger. One more time, Arn, is this the best way to find out what we need to know?”
He seemed to be looking at something a million miles away. “I don’t know. I can’t know. But it’s our best guess, and if we don’t take it, we might still be guessing when Daybreak burns the last book. Steve Ecco will be glad to get the assignment. I think he’s afraid that he’ll never get his chance to prove himself. And I like giving him the chance to do what he wants to do, but I don’t want to lose another friend. I know you make harder decisions than that all the time, and I’m being selfish and silly.”
“I’d say, just human.”
“I just wish being human didn’t have to be quite… so… human.”
They talked about how life hurried on, and the friends that they had made and lost, for another hour.
He had walked all the way home in the glaring Colorado summer afternoon, and was checking the temperature of his solar hot water tank with the idea of a long hot shower, before he remembered that he still hadn’t told Heather about Aaron.
But I guess now I don’t need to. The conversations with Aaron will give me insights I couldn’t get any other way—in fact, yeah. What I extract from Aaron, I can use to plan Steve’s mission, make sure he’s safe and his mission’s productive, and it will be much more believable coming from a guy like Ecco, and from first-hand observation, than it will be coming from my talking to a hippie in a blanket in the middle of the night. RRC will get independently verified information, and my friend will have a much better chance at succeeding at this mission, which is going to mean so much to him.
Besides, what the hell could I tell Heather now? That I just forgot?
THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 3:20 PM MST. SUNDAY, JULY 20, 2025.