Sergio Diaz, smiling, poured a pair of drinks at his mahogany sideboard. Three of the four walls in the mayor's office had been repaired—the last just needed a little touch-up over stray burn marks—and the portrait of Don Juan again hung over the fireplace. Outside, New York City hummed with the sound of jackhammers, hydraulic lifts, and shouting construction workers.

Quaid accepted his drink, a prairie fire prepared with Cholula hot sauce. "Good to be back in the old digs, I take it?"

Sergio nodded. "Yes, quite. We are still finding raccoon nests, and occasionally I do catch a whiff of burned tire. But these are trifles."

"Rifles?" Quaid said.

"No, trifles—I said the raccoons and smell of tires were trifles."

Ten months after escaping Roche Rivard, Quaid still hadn't fully recovered his hearing. Durwood figured it'd come back eventually—he had a call in to Yakov asking what specific mechanisms the sonic weapon employed. The arms dealer hadn't called back, still sore over being strong-armed in a New Jersey storage shed.

"Right," Quaid said now. "I suppose you've got time to fumigate."

The mayor smiled again. Gray streaks glinted in his formerly jet-black hair, but he looked good. Just last week he'd been reelected to another four-year term. While mayors of most U.S. cities had gotten hammered in the first post-Anarchy elections for capitulating to Forceworthy and other private muscle companies, Sergio had been lauded for holding out—for attempting to govern humanely.

"The sideboard came through well," Quaid observed. "I'm amazed looters didn't take it."

Sergio ran his hand over a carved hydra. "Perhaps the piece benefited from supernatural protections."

The old friends considered this over a swig.

Quaid drank his in one, finishing with throat and eyes stinging. "Or from weighing half a ton and nobody being able to budge it."

He poured himself another and joined Sergio at the window.

Six busy months after Data Rejuvenation Day, the Manhattan skyline was beginning to shed its blight. Holes had been patched in skyscrapers. The orange-black haze, whose onset climate researchers had never quite understood, had lifted.

The journey back from the Anarchy's abyss hadn't been easy—though the technology piece had come together quickly. Once Piper downloaded the kernel sourcecode off the keychain drive she'd stolen (back) from Blake Leathersby, it took her less than an our to write an antidote patch and post it to every public server and message board around. She then tweeted from the josiahTheAvenger account that the Blind Mice had "accomplished their goal of bringing the high low and the low high" and were gifting the world back its data.

Few trusted this. Corporations took it for another prank. Cities feared it could further damage their systems. Rivard LLC propagated rumors that the patch actually contained advanced AI laying the groundwork for the enslavement of humans by sentient machines.

Eventually, the success of American Dynamics and New York City in restoring their data convinced others to try the antidote. Gleeful pictures of bank statements and accurate property records began appearing on social media. The process was hampered by hoaxes, opportunists, and cover-up murders, by doubt and guilt and pessimism.

None of these, finally, were enough to stop people from coming together again.

From trusting each other.

The Anarchy already showed signs of becoming instant nostalgia. Hawkers sold buttons with the silhouette of Josiah (missing but presumed lurking somewhere) superimposed over the nose-eyes-whiskers symbol. People wore shirts that said, I Survived the Anarchy and All I Got Was This Lousy Mass-Manufactured T-Shirt.

There were fireworks displays, protest marches, news stories about first speeding tickets or Little League practices. CNN was promoting a two-hour special, Descent Into Chaos: How Eighteen Months Changed a Species.

Now Sergio said, "Today, I thought of you. I hired an intern."

"You say it's almost winter?"

"Intern—I hired a woman, an intern. Made me think of you."

Quaid crimped his brow. "I'm not sure I like where this is headed."

"No, no, nothing like that," the mayor said. "Well, only a little. Her name is Imogen, she's a socialite. Knows all five boroughs intimately. She will file a report each night to me personally, naming the choicest parties in the city."

"Wow," Quaid said. "This dark interlude hasn't changed your personal M.O. much, has it?"

Sergio glanced dubiously at Quaid's tumbler.

"Her report lands on my desk at eight thirty p.m.," he said. "Can I expect you then?"

Quaid crossed one loafer behind the opposite calf. "I actually have someplace to be tonight."

"You do? Maybe we're heading to the same spot then. In her interview, Imogen said she favored club music, eletronica-type. The scene has apparently shifted toward—"

"I doubt that," Quaid interrupted. "The spot I'm headed to is more known for its, uh...beef stroganoff."

Sergio puzzled over this, then began laughing lustily. "McGill? Three weeks you've been away, and you are spending your first night back in Morristown, New Jersey?"

Quaid kneaded the side of his neck. "Appears that way."

Like the rest of civilization, Quaid Rafferty and Molly McGill had emerged from the Anarchy by fits and starts. They'd spent a week in Paris together after the escape, tending the other's physical and emotional wounds. Fabienne Rivard's revelation about Davos had shaken Molly's faith in Quaid, but he worked to restore it. They laid in bed for hours, her strawberry-blond hair across his chest They ate sugary crêpes. They held hands everywhere they went.

It felt natural as sunrise to Quaid, and he'd been prepared to call it happiness.

Back in the States, though, logistics mucked it up. Molly said she needed a solid month to focus on her children, and Quaid too had to get his affairs in order at Caesars Palace—which had reserved his room but needed all guests to reaffirm their identities and charge card information.

Las Vegas, of course, is no friend of commitment. Quaid got reacquainted with the swim-up Blackjack tables. He and Molly talked on the phone, but phone wasn't his best mode of communication. Without close interpersonal contact—the nudges, the eyes talking, the engaged tilts of the head—he struggled to engage.

Molly got annoyed. He got annoyed back. They'd take a break, then Quaid would fly east and they'd be on for ten torrid days, then off, then on again.

To clear his mind, to regain perspective, Quaid tried focusing on work—on growing the Third Chance brand in the wake of their great success foiling the Anarchy.

A handful of sidehustle jobs fell into his lap, jobs too small to require McGill or too morally ambiguous to lure Durwood. Jim Steed had mop-up work related to AmDye's scrapped experimental weapons program. The Turks had a long enemies list. Earth First! demanded that the plunder of coral mineral deposits be stopped.

He did these dutifully, splitting the proceeds between rent, bar bills, and donations to various progressive charities working to piece their missions.

Still, nothing captured his imagination. Nothing got his toes tapping. The big fish of the trouble-making world seemed to be laying low at the bottom of the lake, sleeping off their hangovers.

Maybe it was a sign. Maybe it was Fate nudging Quaid toward a more settled life. Toward McGill.

"You must be careful, friend," Sergio said. "Are you and Miss McGill dining together?"

"I said I'd swing by around five, five thirty," Quaid said.

Sergio smacked his own forehead. "That is the dinner hour!"

"I suppose so."

"Last we spoke, you were hoping to minimize obligations. Now you will eat dinner with the woman...perhaps tomorrow you will eat dinner with her again." The mayor's eyes bulged. "At some point, social conventions will kick in. Social obligations."

"I understand," Quaid said.

Sergio winced. "This dinner is not good. This is dangerous territory you approach."

The mayor's words, together with those two hastily dispatched prairie fires, sloshed through Quaid's brain.

Dangerous.

Dinner was dangerous again.

—

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