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Tell me where.”
    I stopped. “You don’t understand. It’s a
Place
. It’s our
Place.
”
    She lit a cigarette. We didn’t like it when she smoked inside.
    “This commando shit has got to stop,” she said. “A place, a
place—this
is ‘a place.’”
    “No—” Levi started.
    “Adam—”
    “Levi,” I corrected her.
    “
What
?”
    I rolled the duffel aside. She was standing up; I was kneeling, a now taskless arm draped across my knee. We looked chivalric. I’d played knights, in mine and Adam’s D&D games, who knelt like this.
    “Jo,” I said, “
this
is not a Place. Adam is Levi; I am Hiram. We have to be because this won’t be easy.
That
”—I pointed at the window—“will kill us. You can’t be yourself in all this because it won’t work.”
    “Everything has changed,” Levi said.
    She looked from one to the other of us. Scared.
    “We will survive,” Levi said. “We’ll keep you alive. We like you, Jo.”
    “We’ll start everything new.”
    “What?” she said, covering her unease with a drag from her cigarette. “So you’re going to, like, start a tribe, and I’m the one who will bear your warrior sons, or something like that?”
    “Don’t be stupid.”
    I looked at Levi. “Give it to her.”
    He shuffled off to the laundry room. There was a maintenance door in there, which we used to get to the 1890 half.
    She sat down. “What the hell?”
    She was starting to panic.
    …
Do not panic…
.
    “It’s okay.”
    “What about the police? This is like, just like, a hurricane or a disaster or something. You guys need to calm down—this will be over in a few days.”
    “There aren’t enough police,” I said.
    We bounced a little, on the floor, as Levi walked back in. The pier-and-beam foundation had spots, like funny bones, that answered steps in one place with bounces in another.
    He handed her the
Book
.
    “The police have families, too. Friends. They won’t be police much longer.”
    She looked at Section “One.”
    “And the National Guard is mostly overseas.
If
they come back, there’ll be too much for them.”
    “This has been coming, Jo. You’ve watched Salvage.”
    She looked up. “With you guys. Smoking pot. A Friday night in Slade. That’s just … underground art or something.”
    A car roared past outside, full of screaming somebodies.
    I stood up and motioned to Levi, to the gear.
    “We’ll give you an hour, Jo. Read.”
    “You don’t have to come.”
    “We won’t make you come, but you should. Cities are the most unsafe.”
    Levi slung a duffel over his shoulder and headed for the laundry room. I turned on our little black-and-white TV. A fuzzed, diagonal portrait straightened itself, jammed. Which was, in turn, jammed. I listened for a second to the fugue. To the noise. I couldn’t make out even one uninterrupted message. Pictures flashed and jarred. Someone was shooting something live on a hand-mod—I could see people running. The lights were off on Reunion Tower.
    It didn’t matter. We had Salvaged what we needed.
    Jo had her head in her hands, the
Book
in her lap.
    “You’ll need a new name,” I told her softly. “You’ll need to be new.”
    “All right,” Jo said, half an hour later. “Okay.”
    “Okay?”
    We were sitting cross-legged in the living room. Levi was manning the black-and-white, searching the frequencies for something useful. I had turned on the big digital in the corner, but muted it. They were talking about the bankruptcy declaration.About the Emergency Farm Bill. The ticker on the bottom of the display scrolled only one message.
    Remain indoors. Follow law enforcement instructions
.
    Over and over, like a Salvage ’cast. An ouroboric ribbon noosing the talking heads.
    “When can we come back?” Jo asked.
    “We don’t know,” I said. “We’re not planning on coming back.”
    “What if we can?”
    “Depends.”
    “On what.”
    “Which Place is better.”
    She picked at the carpet. “You have