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the couch in his office, honing his mind against the grinding wheel of Terrence’s relentlessly merciless vision of the future.
    Until the several follies of the Montmartre Incident made it possible for Cross to get up off the couch and bring in his evil mastermind desk.
    They will know if you lie .
    He looks up.
    “Who do you want?”
    Cross tips his head, acknowledging, it seems, Terrence’s submission to the circumstances.
    “I want Jae.”
    Terrence looks into his notebook’s open pages.
    “She won’t work for you.”
    “No. But she’ll work for you . Why else would you be here, Terrence, if not for that fact?”
    Haven stretches his legs, crosses his ankles, folds his arms over his chest.
    “ That fact.”
    Terrence looks at Haven, meeting, for the first time since coming into the room, his desert-scarred eyes.
    Haven blinks, deliberate closure, open.
    “Late in the day, old man, for recrimination.”
    Terrence does not blink.
    “I didn’t say anything.”
    Haven raises a hand from the couch, drops it.
    “My mistake. I thought there was a general excavation going on. Dig up the old bones and chew them.”
    Terrence looks back at Cross.
    “Jae won’t work for you. And she won’t work with him. Pick another name.”
    Cross shakes his head.
    “There are no other names. Let’s not play, you don’t have anyone else in your armory. They all stayed with Kestrel. You have Jae. Which is the point, don’t you see? Terrence. Don’t you see? Must I. Spell it out?”
    Terrence doesn’t move.
    Cross raises and drops his shoulders.
    “I must. You have Jae. She is all you have. How long would you have her if she knew you were the one who assigned Haven to Iraq?”
    Terrence is remembering the first annual Conference for Securing 21st-Century Security. Year 2000. His first sight of Cross. Front row of a panel titled National Security and Climate Change, in which Terrence, overtired from an afternoon spent trolling the hospitality suites for contracts to keep Kestrel alive as it incubated, raised his voice over a modulated debate regarding the virtues of switch grass as a fossil fuel replacement: We all know the final solution, and I’m using those words entirely conscious of what they imply—we all know that the final solution to global fucking climate change is going to be a radical reduction in global fucking population. The hush that followed, the heads turned away, suggested that Terrence had rather embarrassingly just vomited into his own lap but that everyone would be pleased to ignore the fact if he would quietly leave and go clean himself up in the bathroom. He did, in fact, remove himself to the john, where Cross found him splashing cold water on the back of his neck and asked if he could buy him a drink. Three vodka tonics later Terrence had offered him a job, never so lucky before or since to have such a talent fall into his lap.
    Haven had been there. One of the believers who had followed Terrence out of government service. His own opinion of Cross characteristically laconic. That guy. He’s got something on his mind, old man.
    Now they all have something on their mind. The past.
    Terrence takes a step sideways.
    “What do you have for her?”
    Cross pushes his empty hands across the desk, a man all in.
    “Money. I have money for her.”
    “She doesn’t need money.”
    Haven touches the top of his head.
    “ Doesn’t need money.”
    Cross flicks his hand westward.
    “She’s running around the desert in a forty-year-old Land Rover, living on a diet of amphetamines and psychedelics, playing with robots, and occasionally crawling to the edge of civilization to do whatever piecework visual analysis you manage to scrape up for her.”
    His face tightens, brows drawing together, lips tensed.
    “She is.”
    He searches for the words to describe what she is and, finding them, spits them out.
    “A wasted resource.”
    No worse sin.
    He exhales, looks at the ceiling, appears about to smile but does