They sat under the stars and he had finally, a little after the fact, brought her around. Henry had expected all sorts of things from the process of moving from the city to the desert, but the one thing he hadn’t foreseen was his wife’s hesitation. He’d conquered his own in private, before mentioning the idea. Then he’d accidentally made Naomi perform hers in the open.

His wife — who climbed rocks in her free time and once broke her jaw in a bar fight over the existence of the Western canon — had balked. Not over money. The inheritance from her parents wasn’t big enough to be life-changing, as they say, but it was big enough for a cross-country move. She’d hesitated over small things, so small they struck him as pathetic, honestly the first time he’d ever thought anything about Naomi deserved that word. She worried about having to drive into town for groceries, about the lack of a community theater scene. She worried about winter even though it was only New Mexico. She worried about the two of them all alone, miles from anything, the only ear at the end of a 911 call halfway across the state. They’d been in the house two weeks so far, and she’d spent them jumping at every rustle in the creosote bushes. Though she was taller, she would lean into his neck like a hurt thing.

Crybaby, he would say.

Eat shit, she would say.

Tonight, though, she sat comfortably holding his hand in the dark. Earlier they’d heard a weird, threatening buzz, but instead of retreating inside Naomi had pulled out her phone and determined it was the sound of nighthawks diving for insects, their parachute mouths agape. The sound was called a boom. Don’t you love that? she asked. Like the rest of the country, they hadn’t seen many birds lately.

He did love it. He loved her. And this place: he was realizing it was everything he’d hoped for. Here, in this desert, they’d have time and space. They’d work their remote jobs and do projects and have their baby, not right away but in the comfortable envelope of soon. It was only 2030; they weren’t even 35. Henry was letting this peaceful notion vent warmly across his body when he glanced at the house and saw, through the lamplit window, a stranger in dark clothes standing in their new living room.

He froze. He almost grabbed Naomi but for two reasons did not. First, if he did she’d scream, and probably the intruder didn’t yet know they were out here, in the dark. Smartest to remain unseen until the intruder took what he wanted and left. Second, if Naomi saw, she would want to go back. She would insist and Henry would give in. No matter if it was just a prank or a mistaken address. The past year of planning, all that money, the future. Gone.

Beside him, she flexed her shoulders. Getting a little chilly, she said. Ready to go in?

Five more minutes? he suggested. It’s so clear.

Sorry, she said, standing. I’m getting cold.

He followed her up the path between the agave and butterfly bushes. The window stood empty now. He shut the sliding glass door behind him without turning his back to the mostly dark house. He walked ahead of Naomi to their bedroom and casually checked the ensuite.

While she showered, he sat on the bed facing the doorway. He couldn’t hear anything over the running water. This was why you did not camp close to a river in hostile territory: it masked the sound of the enemy. This and other pieces of wartime knowledge rushed into his head. Who knew from where. Movies. His dad. When the faucet squeaked off he sprawled gently on his back. He shut his eyes as Naomi padded out of the bathroom and tutted in amusement. He was afraid she’d try to wake him to shower but she didn’t. He opened his eyes while she brushed her teeth then shut them again when she came back out, fit herself against him on the bed, and turned off the lamp.

He listened in the blackness. He felt afraid, but also strangely conspiratorial with this stranger in his house. Get out, he thought. I am giving you time to get out. He didn’t feel angry or want justice or to win. He just wanted this person out.

When Naomi was asleep he rose quietly, closed the door, and in socked feet rushed for his office where the safe was. With some difficulty in the dark he cracked the dial and removed his dad’s old revolver, kept loaded against good advice. He’d made noise getting here. This meant the intruder knew where he was. He sat against the far wall, gun raised. For a long time he waited for the intruder’s body to flash out of the dark. He would shoot.

Eventually he crept forward, peered left and right. No one. He moved into the hall, then the living room, finger straight against the gun with what he knew was called trigger discipline. He didn’t risk a light. He moved carefully through the guest bedrooms and checked under the beds, slowly beginning to suspect that the intruder was no longer in the house. 

Last, he inspected the doors. Each was locked, and he was thinking hallucination, inoperable brain tumor, when he looked up and saw that the house’s one skylight, oddly placed just inside the door to the garage, was propped open. The faint shush of wind. And there: a scuff mark on the windowsill directly below. The intruder had to be very tall to climb up, even with the sill as a boost. Henry wet a rag in the kitchen and wiped the scuff away. He put the revolver under his pillow and lay down. Without meaning to, he slept. When he woke, he found all well.

Henry was a person who hated buying things, but in the weeks afterward he bought cameras and installed them according to YouTube tutorials. He bought motion-sensing lights, spools of duct tape, a second computer monitor, and shooting lessons at a range in town.

Now who’s paranoid? Naomi asked.

Guess you convinced me.

He never found the moment to tell her. He padlocked the skylight, policed the property. A few suspicious indentations in the gravel of the drive, but no definitive trace. For the rest of his life, his mornings would be cut short by thirty minutes: the time it took for him to shuffle to his office, turn on his computer, and drink a cup of coffee to the 16x spool of each maliceless night across his black and white feeds.

 

Their daughter was born Ellis Marie, at two-thirty in the morning, in the town’s small but appropriately serious community hospital. When she was in the womb they called her “the goblin” as a joke. After she was born they mostly called her E.M., or EMP for electromagnetic pulse, because that’s what she felt like.

They had been warned about all the terrible things babies did, but E.M.’s versions felt, for lack of a better word, hateful. Targeted, vicious. While she was teething, Henry witnessed Naomi reduced to a pimple-faced, lurking wight, then looked at himself in the mirror to find, after one particularly harrowing eight-hour nightscreech, the true motherfucking goblin. They survived the first year. He watched as Naomi was forged into iron, unflappable in overalls and a twist headband. In the mirror, he was surprised to find a father.

E.M. walked early, vectoring constantly away from them. She bolted and fell. The desert was not a kind falling place. Naomi worried about the baby’s hands. At the playground in town E.M. ran up to older kids and, gesturing wildly, led them to where a praying mantis catcleaned itself in the sunburnt grass. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, her little hands said.

More than anything, E.M. loved animals. Bug or bird it didn’t matter. She demanded nature documentaries. An ant farm. Her first big Christmas gift was a set of binoculars. She wandered off-trail, gave chase. He sat her down and administered a talk, with visual aids, about venomous creatures, about how it was possible to love something from afar, without touching. E.M. was skeptical.

He hung hummingbird feeders outside her window. One spring, an orange jewel zipped into the glass, and E.M. vowed vengeance on the universe until it shook itself awake in her palm and shot away. Later that same year, she tried but failed to save a jackrabbit kitten he found abandoned under the house’s slab. They buried it in a shoe box. Afterward E.M. did not talk for ten hours. She was only eleven, but that summer she started volunteering at the wildlife rehabilitation center in town.

In reverse of the natural order, it was they who were crafted in her image. They grew to love animals. They hiked. Thank god we moved out here, Naomi said. E.M. would have been a tiger in a concrete box. Which was true. Their only regret was having her so late, being born late themselves. All the wild things around them that she loved were at this point well into dying. There used to be a lot more animals. They didn’t tell E.M. this, but she knew.

She called him Papa. He became one of those men always working on the house. Naomi and E.M. cracked jokes about his weekly gate code change, his premium-tier subscriptions to data storage services for all the security footage. Primly they called out: Chief Inspector! It was true that nothing else had ever happened to them here. The intruder was half a memory by then. Yet, every time he considered hanging up his spurs he sensed that, secretly, his wife and daughter were thankful for his overwatch, for making home feel, without exception, safe. He didn’t know how much that was worth but his guess was a lot.

In middle school E.M. was voted president of her National Junior Honor Society chapter. A week later, she was escorted home after being caught sipping tequila at a Meow Wolf pop-up. Watching the camera footage of her sneaking out, he and Naomi laughed until they cried, not because it was funny, though it was, but out of relief. Both of them — because they were getting older, they guessed — had become incurable introverts in the desert, had resigned themselves to the fact that some atrophy in their brains prevented them from feeling at ease among others anymore, made them come across as distant or uncaring. Throughout E.M.’s childhood, they had been afraid she’d turn out like them: accidentally friendproof and deep down very sad about it. But here was their daughter being yanked into a car by a thicket of loving arms, their daughter filling the house with smoke-eyed goths and junior rangers.

E.M. attended Berkeley, majoring in forestry. After decades of budget cuts and stymied research, the major had become, in the current age of extinction, highly sought after, housed in brand new, green-certified glass cathedrals. Calling home, E.M. explained how business majors were by and large shunned, seen collectively as a suited, swoop-haired disease. She spent the summer after her junior year interning with the National Parks Service in Washington state. Visiting home afterward, she brought a boyfriend along.

His name was Kerrigan and he was not Irish but from a town called Mormon Lake, outside Flagstaff, Arizona. He’d recently graduated and now consulted for a major tech company. His description made the job sound lucrative and, listening, Henry felt a weird surge of masculine relief. Kerrigan also worked in the summers as a firefighter, specializing in wildfires: a hotshot.

Kerry here’s a traitor, E.M. said brightly, touching his arm. He designs thrust vectoring systems for airplanes that kill people, then risks his life for the trees every summer so he can sleep at night.

That’s me, Kerrigan said. Your house is gorgeous, by the way.

After graduation, E.M. snagged a research coordinator job in Santa Fe. She and Kerrigan moved out there, Kerrigan fighting fires with the crew from his hometown in the summers, both of them visiting Henry and Naomi for holidays. Two years later, they video called to announce they were getting married and to ask, shyly, if they could have the wedding and reception at the house. Naomi leaped with joy in the kitchen. Later, Henry wept alone in the bathroom, though not for long.

Summer temperatures had become more and more dangerous since they’d moved to the desert. For the wedding they got permits to overdraw their monthly water ration and, following safety guidelines, held the ceremony after dark. A majority of the guest list was made up of Kerrigan’s and E.M.’s friends from school and service work, but a smaller contingent were friends Henry and Naomi had managed to make, including from Naomi’s climbing club. These townies arrived and stood off to the side, starry-eyed at the galumph of youth in cheap formalwear.

Music playing, Henry and Naomi led E.M. down the torchlit walkway. She barely looked like their daughter. He was amazed. Her dress swished around her tattooed legs. She’d gotten bangs for the wedding and had been triple-worried about them. Naomi had also gotten bangs. When E.M. and Kerry saw each other, they both simultaneously mouthed — Henry saw them do it — no way.

Henry and E.M. did the father-daughter dance. He’d been dreading it for the stupidest, grade-school stage-fright reasons, but the moment revealed itself as a bubble of calm in all the chaos, his daughter’s exhausted face peeled open to an exposed core of joy while lights orbited carousel-like around her flower crown. Love you, Papa, she said, forehead against his sweat-soaked lapel.

When the dance was over, he went inside past the caterers in the kitchen, ducked into an empty guest room, and sat on the bed in the dark. The guest room was on the side of the house away from the wedding. In one corner of the window: the moon, hanging. He spied a couple outside, making out on the stargazing deck he’d built.

Hi, said a voice behind him.

He managed not to startle too badly. Crouched along the side of the bed was a little boy in khakis and a tucked-in shirt, gazing up at him with nocturnal eyes.

Hi there, Henry said, catching his breath. You surprised me. Guess we’re, uh, both hiding out in here, huh?

What are you hiding from? asked the boy.

Nothing really. I’m just taking a beat.

The boy flicked a shoelace.

Are you playing hide-and-seek? Henry asked. Or Sardines?

What’s Sardines?

It’s like hide-and-seek in reverse. You seek, but when you find people, you hide with them.

Oh, said the boy. Then: I’ve been in here a long time.

You think the game might be over?

Like a really long time.

I see, he said. Do you need help?

I don’t know where my mom is.

Well, let’s go find her, Henry said, standing and offering a hand. The boy hesitated, then took it and stood. He was monstrously tall. His legs unfolded, then continued unfolding until his bones ended. The boy came up to Henry’s chin, though he otherwise looked like he couldn’t have been older than nine or ten.

I’ve seen you before, the boy said as they walked down the hall.

This is my house.

I know.

He led the boy around the patio, making sure that the whole wedding was visible and they were visible to the whole wedding. Hell, you could probably see this kid from space.

Any luck? he asked the boy when they reached the drink coolers.

No, said the boy, wiping his hands on the storkish legs of his pants. He was breathing fast.

Maybe she went to look at the stars, Henry suggested. He led the boy around the back of the house, but there was no one. All the guests had been drawn into the warm cocoon of music and light.

I got married just like this a long time ago, he told the boy, remembering.

Okay.

The couple on the stargazing deck had left, but the boy’s mother wasn’t there either. Eventually they looped back to the front of the house.

Everything alright? Naomi asked, walking up to them.

We’re trying to find mom, Henry explained.

Oh. Naomi almost knelt to talk to the boy, then realized she didn’t have to. Henry watched her try to figure his age against his amazing height. Nine-year-old E.M. had been tiny. She’d wanted deer spots. They’d found do tattoos hurt a lot in her tablet’s search history.

Where did you see her last? Naomi asked.

She went out to the car, mumbled the boy. She said she was ready to go.

Naomi looked at Henry. That, he said, would have been useful information to know. She grinned, kissed the corner of his mouth.

Come back to us soon, okay? she said, and took her new bangs back to the party.

The driveway was devoid of any pissed-off mothers waiting on car hoods. Did your mom park here or out on the road? Henry asked.

The road.

He’d programmed the security gate to stay open all night. Past it, more cars packed the road’s shoulders in both directions. Seeing them a feeling came over him, not sad but certain, that the house would never be this full again. Somewhere in the dark a creature yelped in terror or love. He didn’t see anyone.

Headlights rounded the hill across from the house, speeding. He guided the boy back for the car to pass, but it heaved to a stop in the gravel before them.

Jesus fucking Christ, said the driver. There you are.

The car was older, old enough it had a combustion engine — rarer and rarer, these days. It purred and coughed. Henry remembered how cars used to do this, back when he was a boy. They used to smell. The headlights shone out in twin yellow cones. The driver’s face was obscured in a thick cotton ball of cigarette smoke.

Henry leaned into the window, eyes watering. Hey there, he said. We had a bit of trouble finding you, too.

Get in, she told the boy. I’m not messing around.

He didn’t have any idea where you were.

The cotton ball turned to him. And who the fuck are you supposed to be? She said this with enough vitriol that Henry stood back. The car was low, boxy, and black. If he saw this car with little flags perched above the headlights, a diplomat waving from the back seat, he wouldn’t blink.

Henry kept his voice measured. This is my home, he said. Until very recently you were in my home, attending my daughter’s wedding.

The driver was silent a moment. Congratulations, she said.

Mom? the boy asked, peering.

Now.

The boy blinked, then reached for the door handle. In the motion, maybe, was a weary familiarity: Here is my mother again, yelling at me to get in the car after already driving away once. But also in the motion, Henry definitely recognized, was fear.

He took the boy’s hand again. Actually, he said, can I ask you to step out of the car?

What?

Step out of the car, please? We can’t see your face. Is this your mom? he asked the boy. Can you tell?

The boy squinted.

Am I his mom? the driver spat. Her burst of breath made the smoke pull and roll. What are you, a fucking cop?

We’re in the middle of nowhere, he argued back, sounding like a cop. You were a wedding guest, yet you don’t know who I am. Apparently you drove off without your son in your car. What, were you trying to scare him straight?

Listen, the driver said, her tone shifting. You’re kind of making me feel unsafe.

Henry paused. Unsafe? I’m looking out for your son. If that’s who he is. If you step out, maybe show me some I.D., we can clear this up. There was something dark on the driver’s hands and wrists, he noticed. Mud?

There’s no way I’m getting out of this car, she said. She sounded scared. Please just let us go. Please leave us alone.

I’m not holding him hostage. He’s not even sure who you are. Are you, son?

The boy was taller than the car’s roof. He bent slightly, narrow in his dark clothes, his left side lit red by the taillights. It’s his house, Mom, he ventured. He’s good.

Please get in the car, baby, pleaded the driver. Please, sir, don’t hurt us.

I’m not going to hurt anyone.

The boy stood awkwardly, looking down the road in the direction the car had come from. The mud, actually, was also on his shoes, up the ankles of his pants. It was red like the dirt around the side of the house, by the garage. Henry’s own shoes were clean. The boy sighed. As if in realization that whatever came down the road next could be much worse than this, he let go of Henry’s hand. Thank you for helping me, the boy said, and folded himself into the car.

It was a beautiful wedding at a beautiful house, the driver said, then stomped on the gas. The car weaved back around the hill and was gone.

The next night, he confessed to E.M. that he might have gotten into it with one of her friends. She looked quizzical; he explained. Once back in Santa Fe she texted that she had asked around and no one knew what he was talking about. Her friends had absolutely loved him.

 

Both without warning and as the experts had long predicted, the crisis years began. It had all caught up with them: the oceans, the weather, the heat. The West Coast experienced the worst wildfire season in its history, and E.M. and Kerrigan moved — of course they did — to the epicenter in northern California to help alongside Kerrigan’s Arizona crew. On the news, Henry and Naomi watched the fires spread deep through the late, dry winter and then, horrifically, into the following spring. On her weekly video calls, E.M. was grim with pride. Kerrigan led his crew on the frontlines, screaming into fifty-year-old, sootclogged radios over the gulp of the flames. E.M. had found a research position. All the wildlife being flushed out, ecologists were discovering new species every other day. Both E.M. and Kerrigan were working fourteen-, sixteen-hour days. Food that doesn’t come out of an MRE? Never heard of it, E.M. joked.

These calls started to bother Henry. It’s not safe, her being out there, he ranted after one. We should get her home. Tell her we need her here.

We’ll do no such thing, Naomi said.

He turned.

Listen, she said. Do I love that she’s there? No. Do I wish that all three of us had been born sixty years earlier so she could study anything that isn’t extinct or actively on fire? Of course. But this is now, and this is what she was meant to do. Hardly anyone finds that. We’re not forcing her away from it. 

She was right, and he was ashamed. Naomi looked at him with her weakening eyes. Her glasses got meatier every year, though with her rock climbing she’d stayed stronger than him. Twenty-five years later, she’d become more or less the reluctant czar of her climbing club, leading trips and managing the budget. At events, troubled young chalkpalms came up and asked for advice in their strange, numerical notation.

Kerrigan’s hotshot crew was on social media, appealing for desperately needed donations. Henry was surprised by how many of the posts highlighted the physical attractiveness of the firefighters. The crew was mostly men, with some women. In many clips everyone’s shirts were off, patinaed fire pants slung low across their woodcarved hips. They had an outdoor shower — a red plastic water bladder hung from a tree. Every post featuring the shower was wildly successful: the hotshots posing nude with tiny, strategically placed towels, their retrofit military truck ever present in the background, olive green and stenciled with MORMON LAKE HOTSHOTS. Kerrigan posed among them, and you could see what it was about him: the foxgrin swagger he managed, unlike so many, to convert into generosity.

There were other posts, too, that didn’t shy away from the destruction. Greasy smoke slid up Henry’s phone screen. The hotshots ripped off their masks, tears streaming down their filthy faces.

Henry donated, and so did Naomi. They forgot to tell each other they did so.

During that first year in California, E.M. seemed clear-eyed and frantic, amped with purpose. But into the second wildfire season the atmosphere of her weekly check-ins began to shift. Henry tracked this call to call. She appeared on-screen wrapped in a blanket, eyes glassy. Feels like bailing out the ocean with a soda can, she said.

Above and below her face the news tickers and ads from their mid-tier data plan: another emergency budget being pushed through Congress, currently filibustered. A fast food chain had switched to all seaweed-based plastic. Check out their new High Temps Low Prices value menu. Meanwhile E.M. talked about how the world was losing so much biomass every second, wildfires or not, that it was literally getting lighter. Imagine the loss from insects alone, she said. That winter, when the last gray wolf died in captivity, she called and sobbed wordlessly, ignoring their increasingly frightened questions.

I just don’t know anymore, E.M. said. Another call, the end of her third wildfire season. Get this: this morning we caught a lumber company clearing stands three miles south of a burn zone. We’re losing entire forests and what do these parasites think to themselves? Let’s have even fewer trees.

Kiddo, Henry ventured. Maybe you should take a break.

Every single one of them deserves to die.

E.M.

No, actually they deserve to be tortured for hours, then to die. E.M. rubbed the corners of her eyes. Sorry. Listen, I’m hearing some weird stuff from friends at New Mexico State. Are you guys doing okay?

We’re worried about you, Naomi told her.

Maybe a month and a half later, something woke Henry in the night. He lay in bed, listening. Cold outside. Cobweb dusting of snow across the rain collection tarps. There: almost undetectable under the calm roar of the house’s pellet stove, a gentle pulse. He tucked the quilt against Naomi’s curved, eggcool back and rose. The living room flickered as the stove’s fuel ran down. On the kitchen island where he’d left his phone to charge overnight, E.M.’s senior class photo stared up.

Sweetheart? he answered.

Papa, E.M. whispered very, very quietly.

It was a different sort of call than the gray wolf call. E.M. whispered the entire time. Papa, she told him, Kerry died tonight. He and another hotshot were chasing another lumber truck, she said, and the fire closed around them, so quickly. I saw his body, Papa. No way he’s alive. 

There was going to be a funeral but if she attended, she said, she’d kill herself or someone else. Instead she was coming home. She’d already bought the flight. 

Papa, she whispered, can you pick me up?

When they hung up, Henry went back to the bedroom and turned on a lamp. He sat there until Naomi woke naturally from the light. She sat up blinking, expression half-amused by default. What time is it? she asked. He put a hand on her knee, feeling the play of their winter sheets over the joint, and waited as her face changed.

Ten hours later, E.M. descended the escalator at El Paso International Airport, her face a shelled wall. They took her into their arms. She squeaked deep in her throat like a mouse. He drove while Naomi sat in the back with her, E.M. howling. This is what it means to be a father, he thought. He played the radio low. Every so often he reached back and someone, probably Naomi, gripped his wrist.

E.M. spoke for the first time two hours into the three hour drive. Mama, she said, why do you have a gun?

Naomi waited for him to speak.

Just a safety measure, my love, he said.

Wait, you have one too? E.M. asked.

He did. And there were more at the house, though he didn’t say this.

E.M. gawked as they passed through the double-layer, ten-foot barbed wire fence that now wound around the scalp of their hill. The light in E.M.’s bedroom was rain jacket yellow: the color of the sun through the gargantuan water tank now outside her window. She paused in the doorway, clocked this fact, then entered. Naomi followed.

He went in that night with a grilled cheese and a Coke balanced on a tray. He set it on the bed and sat on the floor. Eventually E.M. poked her head out of her blanket shroud and took a bite with her eyes closed.

A fence, Papa? Guns? she croaked. What exactly are you protecting yourself from?

He explained. Around the time she and Kerrigan had gone to California, the groundwater in their town had run out. The reservoirs had fallen below some critical level. This had been inevitable, but they’d thought they had more time. The State of New Mexico had appointed a special committee that had so far accomplished nothing. Henry had been driving four hours to Albuquerque every other month, filling up his water tank at an abandoned gas station under the watch of the chatty vulture, a teenager who sat on the roof of the place with a long rifle, and two machinelearned, patrolling robot dogs with guns mounted on their carapace backs.

E.M. traced a circle in the air: the shape of the fence around the house. People have tried to take your water?

Not yet, he told her. There were more and more people on the road on their way north, and they were thirsty. Some had come up to the gate wanting handouts or to exchange goods, wanting to know if he knew a place to go. He’d helped with directions but hadn’t traded or given anything. What he was hearing from neighbors and on the local news was that if you became known as a giver, people showed up to take. Or took anyway. Here it was still okay, but out on I-10 cars were being found stripped, on fire, the owners gone. Only a handful, but this was why Henry and Naomi had picked her up armed.

Okay, E.M. said. But the quail, Papa. The rabbits. They can’t get through the fence to the drinking pond anymore.

The drinking pond dried up, baby.

E.M. blinked. It’s not like this up north, she whispered.

We’ve heard it is in some places, he said, gently. You were just so focused on the fires.

Here E.M.’s grief crashed into her face once again. I’m done talking now, she said, and disappeared under her blankets.

Naomi was asleep on the couch, exhausted from the drive. Henry refilled the pellet stove and sat in his office. On his computer, he typed in Kerrigan’s crew’s social media handle. The account was livestreaming. Henry clicked. 

Unclear, at first, what he was looking at. The camera smeared from darkness across a bright swatch to darkness again. Eventually he discerned the footage was from inside a vehicle driving at night among gigantic trees. The hotshots’ truck — Henry recognized it from their equipment tour videos. The Smokey Bear bobblehead duct-taped to the dash. Before them on the road, lit white hot by their headlights, drove a lumber truck stacked tall with sawn timber. It loomed frighteningly close, then drew away. Slow down, one of the hotshots said. No, urged another. Speed up. 

Both vehicles were going very fast. One moment the speed didn’t really register but the next it was exaggerated cartoonishly. Get them, shouted someone. Get up on them. The lumber truck leaned heavily around a corner. As the hotshots caught up the camera whipped. The feed froze. When it restarted, the lumber truck was tipped on its side into a gully, the timber sliding from its chains. People ran at the wreck, more than could have fit into one truck. Other crews must have been chasing the lumber people, too. Carrying axes and other implements, they swarmed the fallen truck, climbed it. The mic caught snatches of talk, a chant that grew louder. The climbers wrenched the driver-side door open and lifted a limp man out by his shirt. Henry clicked off the livestream.

His heart pounded with what he realized was righteousness. He felt dutiful, and out of duty tried to reopen the stream. But he couldn’t. The next few days he watched as several hotshot crews were arrested or pursued. A protest boiling before a local courthouse.

Henry wasn’t sure if E.M. was aware of any of this. She had her phone, though she wouldn’t answer it. All her friends and colleagues kept calling him and Naomi. You need to get her help, they said. We will, Naomi promised, rolling her eyes. They had already agreed: they would do whatever E.M. wanted.

What E.M. wanted was the fence down. I feel trapped, Papa, she said. I don’t want to feel trapped. She didn’t say much else. He tried to meet her halfway by removing just the barbed wire — a forty-hour job in armored gloves that left thin cuts across his cheeks. E.M. shrugged. It wasn’t until every length of chain link was piled behind the garage that she stepped out onto the cold patio in bare feet, blanket wrapped around her, and breathed in three times without breathing out. It was the first time she’d been outside since coming home. The next morning, she ate breakfast with them in the kitchen.

Henry was glad, so glad. But with the fence down he slept worse. He got up and, counter-clockwise, looked out each of the house’s windows with night vision goggles, the world green, black, and without movement.

Now that E.M. was in the house, they used more water faster. The auxiliary tank fell below its refill line ahead of schedule, but Henry didn’t want to drive to Albuquerque. He was afraid to leave Naomi and E.M. alone without the fence. We’ll be fine, Naomi assured him. I’ll sit in the crow’s nest the whole time.

He left at dawn, the transport tanks strapped into the truck bed. He was two miles from the fillup site when his instincts told him something was wrong. He found the gate swinging in the breeze, hinges forced inward. Inside there was no one. No kid on the roof. Water tank empty. Around the building’s side he found the carcass of one of the robot dogs, its camera array shattered. He got out of there.

Driving back, he tried to think what to tell E.M. and Naomi. Without a water source they could not stay at the house much longer. Any other source in this area would be hard to find, dangerous, and obscenely expensive. Their only real choice was to go north like everyone else. 

He came around the bend on their road, thinking. Twenty feet from their gate he stopped. The gate was still closed, but around it, through the topsoil, were clear tire tracks, cacti crushed in the ruts. Someone had driven through where the fence had been.

Henry left the truck and crouchran up the drive, drawing his pistol and disengaging the safety. Two strange vehicles were parked before the garage. A sandbeaten sedan and a Jeep piled with gear, dusty water coolers strapped to the rear rack. He heard voices and moved toward the Jeep’s front, where he leaned over the hood, arms braced across the burning metal.

In view was a picnic. One of Henry’s old folding tables draped in a sheet held down by pitchers and cups brimming with water. He saw E.M. — the rest were strangers. A man, a woman, two boys, and a little girl. The girl breathed unevenly in her mother’s lap, her face bright red. E.M. crouched before her, blotting spilled water from the girl’s shirt with a cloth.

Naomi walked out of the garage with a plate of cheese and crackers. Her eyes were bright until she noticed him and stopped. People turned. It’s okay, she said, setting down the plate and approaching him, hands out as if to calm an animal. Everything’s fine. Their little girl was dehydrated. They didn’t know what else to do.

They drove around the gate, he said. 

I know, Naomi said. They —

Papa, E.M. called. Put the fucking gun away. Right now. There are children here. She snarled this. Henry holstered his gun.

The father of the family came over. It’s quite alright, he said, arms out as if in welcome. Completely understandable. I would have reacted in exactly the same way. Your lovely wife told us about you. There were no secrets. Please, the father said, gesturing. Join us. Not that it’s my place to invite you to sit on your own land!

It’s not his land, E.M. said, eyes still on the little girl. You can’t own land. It was here before us and it will be here after us.

The father laughed, not dismissively. A philosopher! he said. My friend, you are even more blessed than I thought.

Henry let himself be led to the table and poured a cup of his own water. He drank it. He was trying to calm down. Is your daughter okay? he managed to ask. Naomi had joined E.M. at the table’s other end.

She will be, the father said with great relief. Thank god Naomi and Ellis Marie were here. We were desperate. Our girl was limp in my wife’s arms. I’m sure you understand. The more you have, the more you have to protect.

Henry noticed dark spots on the tablecloth. He could not remember the last time he’d poured water carelessly enough to spill it. He understood why Naomi wanted to help these people, their poor little girl. But he had seen the water coolers on the family’s Jeep rack, loose in their straps, unweighted, empty. The house’s half-exhausted yellow tank was visible over a near corner of the roof.

Henry realized for the first time how tall the father of the family was. He could probably lift himself to the roof from the ground for a better look. There was a distance between the man’s brow and his smile so blank your eyes slid off it. His smell was smoke.

In any case, the father said, you look well. A little older, perhaps. And this place! You’ve taken such good care of it. Whether you own it or not. He winked.

Older? Henry asked.

I’m only congratulating you! said the father. You’ve done it. You’ve been so careful, kept everyone safe. Well, almost everyone. But who could hope for more?

He didn’t know this man, Henry was sure. I don’t know you, he said.

Of course. But I know this place.

You do?

How could I not? The house on the hill.

Henry looked across the table at the father’s sons. One had risen to check on his sister. The other sat hunched, his hands under the table. This boy had not, Henry realized, once lifted his hands above the table. The muscles in his arms were tight as if he gripped something and now, looking, Henry caught on his young face the tail end of an expression directed covertly at his father. It asked, clearly: Now?

Henry sat up. He felt an urge to explain to this other father not that they were functionally out of water too and thus not worth any trouble, but about the house. Yes it was good and strong, he wanted to warn them, but there was something in it that kept coming back around. It was, in fact, coming back around right now. 

I know what you’re thinking, the father said. Time. It’s ridiculous how fast it goes. It’s unfair. He looked toward Naomi and E.M., gathered beside his wife, daughter, and son like figures in a Rembrandt, balanced and only a little aware of being witnessed. Naomi looked so happy. It had been too long since they had been generous to anyone. The daughter took a bite of cracker and the mother began to weep in gratitude.

I have a very clear memory, the father said, his hand heavy, keeping Henry in his seat. This one was as old as this one. He nodded at his sitting son, then his daughter. We were camping. For fun. This was before. My boy and I were up early. It was his birthday and I remember him turning away from me and toward the moon. It was full and yellow and low to the ground. And he put his arms out for it and ran.