"I'm Hatch," the man said. "Welcome to nowhere."

Instinctively I pinned my purse to my side, which was idiotic—if this behemoth wanted my stuff, my elbow wasn't stopping him.

I could not speak. The man occupied the entire door frame. Was he seven feet tall? I didn't know. Close. Tattoos covered his skin from head-to-toe, looking like a mass of teaming snakes for all the bulging muscle underneath. I could barely make out individual designs in the dark, but a few stood out—a bald eagle flaring up out of his shirt and into the hollow of his neck, a pair of classic hot-rods breathing fire down either forearm, the Declaration of Independence scripted across his shaved skull.

His broad fingers accommodated what I already knew to be his URL: detonatetheworldorder.org.

He gestured to my Prius. "You drive that?"

It took me a few starts, but finally I managed, "Yeah. 57 MPG."

He nodded. Up, not down. I felt like I needed to say more so I indicated the only other vehicle in the lot, a rusty pickup with boulder-sized tires. "And that truck is yours?"

He said yep. Sure was. I didn't see a flex fuel sticker. "Do you own this place? Or work here?"

His eyes were active, impenetrable. A wind passed through the shop behind him—his bulbous left calf propped the door—and I thought I heard something like a dental hygienist's scraping.

"Did you come alone."

It wasn't inflected like a question, but his biceps demanded an answer.

"Yes. Like you said to."

"Are you attempting to join the Blind Mice in concert with law enforcement."

"No."

"Are you attempting to join the Blind Mice for journalistic reasons, or in concert with a third party of any other sort."

My thumb and forefinger started for the lobe of my ear, the one with Durwood's microphone, but I stopped them. "N—no."

Hearing my voice crack, I repeated the word. "No."

Hatch inhaled, which made the beak of his bald-eagle tattoo stretch across his Adam's apple. "Are you mad?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

I thought. Long or short answer? "I'm mad about what this country's become."

The trace of a grin appeared. Quickly he was serious again. "Do you believe it can be fixed?"

A bright part of my brain almost answered, Yes of course!, but I stopped in time.

"No." I shook my head, slowly, grimly.

Hatch folded his arms over his chest.

I said, "It needs to get blown up first. We have to start from rubble."

The giant considered me for several seconds. I kept my eyes on his and hiked one hand up my hip, forcing a defiant pose even though I wanted to shrink into the pavement. Durwood had said tonight would be "the key moment." I had completed their questionnaires, solved their riddles, but now came the hard part. The sniff test. No keyboards. No avatars. No unlimited time to compose an answer.

Face to face, could I pass for a Blind Mouse?

Hatch asked if I knew what a pup was.

"Like a puppy? A juvenile dog?"

"No. The generalized form of the word, which also applies to rodents." His diction rising, a whiff of the philosophical tint I had observed in his blog. "95% of individuals that reach this point in the process become Blind Pups."

"What's a Blind Pup?"

"Lesser tier," Hatch said. "Pups may post to our website and propagate mayhem under our rubric, but they cannot participate in—nor receive information pertaining to—official missions."

"Basically a fan club?" I said.

Without answering, Hatch turned and walked into the tattoo parlor. The clap of boots on tile boomed about the deserted strip mall.

I followed.

Inside, Hatch led me to the station with the bare neon tube and spun the chair around. When he tried lowering the vinyl seat, its kick-pedal stuck. He banged with the flat edge of his fist and it yielded in a deafening oof. He picked a large, pen-like needle off a tray, poised his massive fingers around its shaft, and raised his eyes to me.

I said, "That gets sterilized?"

He tapped the base of the needle. "Autoclave cooks at 250 degrees. Sterile enough for you?"

I gave a small, gulping nod.

Hatch shuffled on his stool, squaring me up. "Wrist, ankle, or back."

Determinedly, I avoided watching the ink climb to the tip of the needle. I thought of Karen's smile. Of zinnias in my garden, pink, symmetrical. "This means I'm becoming a Mouse, right?"

"Not necessarily. Pups get the mark too. Judgment comes after."

I reared back. "That sucks."

The word just popped out. Generally I didn't use it, Zach and his friends having ruined it for me with overuse long ago.

But Hatch wasn't upset. "No argument there. So what'll it be?"

I glanced at each of the three candidate body parts. Wrist was out unless I wanted to wear sleeves for the rest of my working life. Ankle would make sandals difficult, and I loved sandals.

"How big?"

He unbuckled his belt, started wresting up his shirt. For a moment I hid my eyes thinking he'd misunderstood, but he kept his pants on. His mark was beside his belly button.

I had seen the nose-eyes-whiskers before, online and on Zach's T-shirt, but now, staring out from this huge man's stomach, the symbol shocked me with its raw, insistent anger. The slant-fill eyes. The missing ear.

I asked, "Why isn't yours wrist, ankle, or back?"

Hatch tucked his shirt back in. "Because it's anarchy."

I chose the small of the back. Hatch worked professionally, never exposing more skin than necessary, his hand steady through sirens and dog barks and a car backfiring outside.

Did it hurt? Let me answer with a question: how would you feel about your flesh being slowly and meticulously gouged by a steel hook? The eyes and whiskers parts burned, a kind of slow, unrelenting bee-sting; but it was the mouse's nose that killed me. The pain peaked over my spine, and when the needle's vibration reached bone, the sensation traveled all the way to my teeth.

Hatch stroked the last whisker, then swabbed antiseptic across the whole design and kick-lowered my chair. I popped out feeling like we should shake on it, or admire his handiwork in some mirror. Neither seemed to be in the cards.

He held the grate as we headed back outside, power-lifting it clear of my head.

"I respect your blog," I said. "You take risks. You say tough stuff."

We stood under the black awning. I wasn't sure whether I had made a mistake acknowledging his identity. The URL was right there across his knuckles. So far he'd treated me decently, but could I really expect consistent behavior from a man sporting pentagrams on both earlobes?

Hatch reached into his fatigue-style pants and produced a scrap of paper.

Between his wide fingertips, I thought I glimpsed numbers. Maybe a zip code. "Is that the address for Lewd Brew?"

Mumbling something about not believing crap you read on the internet, he propped a foot on his truck's running board. Rust flaked to the asphalt.

From his back pocket he produced a larger scrap.

"This," he said, indicating the second, "contains a list of dates. Rallies, flash mobs. Occupy marches. Also private email addresses for every CEO in the Despicable Dozen. It's what we give Blind Pups."

I swallowed.

"And this"—twiddling the smaller—"is good for one night only. Tonight. For Mice."

Hatch raised the Mice scrap just off-center of our shared sightline, seeming to gauge it beside my face. Then the other.

I clutched my purse strap with such strength that a zipper-pull jabbed my ribs. I was on the verge of joining, or not, a band of outlaw revolutionaries. Kids a decade younger than me who wanted to bump the world clean off its axis. I understood heavy psychology was at play—a goal long worked for, long withheld; the approval of Quaid and Durwood; natural human desire for peer groups—but the fact remained:

I wanted it worse than anything.

What if they only made me a Pup? Could I keep blogging, rant my way back into consideration? Maybe I should get the truck's license plate—that would at least give Quaid and Durwood someplace to start in case I got rejected.

After a full minute of contemplation, Hatch reached through his driver-side window and felt above the visor. His hand came back with a book of matches. He picked one out with his teeth, grinning tightly about the wooden stem.

"Nibble forth," he said.

And struck the match, and held its flame against the smaller scrap. The scrap's edges began curling into red-black ash.

My heart sank. Well, don't feel sorry for yourself. He did say 95%.

Two strange things happened then. Hatch wadded the larger Pup scrap and tossed it back into the truck's cab. With the opposite hand, he flicked the burning scrap toward me.

I danced away, throwing my arms over my face. Vaguely I heard an engine groan alive and tires squeal. When I dared to peek out through my crossed wrists, the truck was gone.

My eyes dropped to the asphalt. Inches from my feet, the scrap was smoldering. Heat licked at my toes. The flaming paper threw just enough light for me to read its contents:

Z7976. 16M.

I said each number three times in my head before the scrap crumpled to cinders.