“That’s suicide.”

“I’ve done it before.”

Apgar looked at him pointedly. “And you were fucking lucky, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Never mind that you’re thirty years older and New York is two thousand miles away. According to Donadio, it’s crawling with dracs.”

“I’ll take Alicia with me. She knows the territory, and the virals won’t attack her.”

“After last night’s performance? Be serious.”

“The city won’t stand unless we kill him. Sooner or later, that gate will fail.”

“I don’t disagree. But taking on Fanning with two dozen soldiers doesn’t seem like much of a plan to me.”

“What do you suggest? That we hand Amy over?”

“You should know me better than that. On top of which, once we give her to Donadio, we’ve got nothing. No cards to play.”

“So what, then?”

“Well, have you given any more thought to Fisher’s boat?”

Peter was speechless.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Apgar continued. “I don’t trust the man any farther than I can throw him, and I’m glad you tossed his ass out of here. I don’t tolerate division in the ranks, and he was way out of line. Also, I have no idea if that thing will even float.”

“I don’t believe what I’m hearing.”

Apgar let a moment pass. “Mr. President. Peter. I’m your military adviser. I’m also your friend. I know you, how you think. It’s served you well, but the situation is different. If it were up to me I’d say sure, go down swinging. The gesture might be symbolic, but symbolism matters to old warhorses like us. I hate these things, and I always have. But by any measure, this isn’t going to end well. Like it or not, you’re the last president of the Texas Republic. That pretty much leaves you in charge of the fate of the human race. Maybe Fisher’s full of shit. You know the man, so that’s your call. But seven hundred is better than nothing.”

“This place will come apart. There’s no way we’ll be able to mount a coherent defense.”

“No, probably we won’t.”

Peter turned back to the window. It really was awfully damn quiet out there. He had the unsettled sense of observing the city from some distant future time: buildings empty and abandoned, dead leaves rolling in the streets, every surface being slowly reclaimed by wind and dust and years—the permanent silence of lives stopped, all the voices gone.

“Not that I’m objecting,” he said, “but is this first-name thing going to be a habit?”

“When I need it, yeah.”

Below him in the square, a group of boys appeared. The oldest of them couldn’t have been more than ten. What were they doing out there? Then Peter grasped the situation: one of the boys had a ball. At the center of the square, he dropped it on the ground and kicked it, sending the rest scurrying after it. A pair of five-tons pulled into the square; soldiers disembarked and began to set up a line of tables. More were hauling out crates of weaponry and ammunition to be distributed among the civilian inductees. The boys took only cursory notice, lost in their game, which appeared to have nothing in the way of formal structure: no rules or boundaries, no objectives or way to keep score. Whoever possessed the ball tried to keep it away from the others, until he was bested by one of his companions, thus starting the mad chase all over again. Peter’s thoughts took him back many years, first to the formless contests that had diverted Caleb and his friends for hours and their contagious youthful energy—just five more minutes, Dad, there’s still plenty of light, please just one more game—and then to his own boyhood: that brief, innocent span in which he had existed in total obliviousness, outside the flow of history and the accumulated weight of life.

He turned from the window. “Do you remember the day Vicky summoned me to her office to offer me a job?”

“Not really, no.”

“As I was leaving, she called me back. Asked about Caleb, how old he was. She said—and I think I have this right—‘It’s the children we’re doing this for. We’ll be long gone, but our decisions will determine the kind of world they’re going to live in.’ ”

Apgar gave a slow nod. “Come to think of it, maybe I do remember. She was a cunning old broad, I’ll give her that. It was a masterpiece of manipulation.”

“No chance I could turn her down. It was just a matter of time before I surrendered.”

“So what’s your point?”