n a tray, on his desk, are the blistered remains of a gadget. Strickland’s been staring at it for hours. A section of metal pipe peeled open by some kind of explosion. A red blotch that looks like deep-fried plastic. Black, crusted veins that probably used to be wiring. Truth is, he doesn’t have the first fucking clue. He’s not even really trying. He’s just staring.

Whatever sort of bomb it was, it melted everything. That’s his life now, isn’t it? Melted. His efforts to be a dad. The cardboard notions he’d had of domestic tranquility. Even his body. He glances at the bandages. He hasn’t changed them for days. They’re gray, damp. This is what happens to corpses in caskets. They melt to black sludge. And it won’t stop at his fingers. He feels the decay worming up the arteries of his arm. Tendrils of it already gluing to his heart. The Amazon was replete with such rank fecundity. There might be no stopping it.

A knock on his door. He’s been staring at the tray so long that it aches to roll his eyeballs. It’s Fleming. Strickland dimly recalls requesting this visit. Fleming had gone home to sleep. To sleep. After this level of disaster? Strickland never considered leaving Occam. He convinced himself it had nothing to do with how, if he wanted to go home, he’d first have to assess the damage to the Caddy. The thought is disrupted by Fleming clearing his throat. The gray light of the security monitors is like an X-ray. Strickland can see Fleming’s flabby organs. His twiggy bones. The pulsing electrodes of his fear.

“You making any progress with that?” Fleming asks.

Strickland doesn’t glare. To glare requires an ounce of respect. Over the top of the clipboard behind which Fleming hides, Strickland can see a neck bruise from where he throttled Fleming during the blackout. The fucker’s as tender as a fruit.

Fleming clears his throat again, consults his clipboard. “We have a lot of paint chips to work with. That should tell us a lot. Make, model. Best of all, we’ve got the whole front bumper. We can put out search parties right away to look for a white van without a bumper. It’d be easier if we could involve local police, but I understand why you don’t want to do that. Right now we’ve got the whole lot roped off so we can measure tire treads.”

“Tire treads,” Strickland repeats. “Paint chips.”

Fleming swallows. “We’ve also got surveillance tapes.”

“Except from the camera that matters. Do I have that right?”

“We’re still combing the footage.”

“And not a single eyewitness who can tell us anything useful.”

“We’ve really only just begun interviews.”

Strickland drops his gaze back to the tray. Food belongs on a tray. He imagines eating the gadget. His teeth cleaving against the metal bits. The swallowed pieces sitting heavy and strong in his stomach. He could become the bomb. The question would be where he chose to place himself when he exploded.

“If you don’t mind me saying so,” Fleming continues, “I believe we’re dealing with highly trained elites here. Well financed and well equipped. Infiltration took less than ten minutes. My opinion, Mr. Strickland, is that this is the work of Red Army Special Forces.”

Strickland doesn’t respond. Russian penetration? Could be. First satellite, first animal, and first man in space. Next to those feats, the theft of the century is nothing. Plus, there’s Hoffstetler. Except Strickland can’t find a feather of proof Hoffstetler did anything wrong last night. The whole attack, it doesn’t feel Russian. It’s too sloppy. The van he assaulted with the Howdy-do was a piece of junk. The driver some hysterical old man. Strickland needs time to think. That’s why he called Fleming here. Now he remembers. He sits up straight. Grabs his painkillers. Tosses a few into his mouth and chews.

“What I wanted to say,” he declares, “what I want to make absolutely clear, is that we confine knowledge of this situation to Occam until I give the say-so. Give me a chance to contain it. No one needs to know about this, not yet, you understand?”

“Except General Hoyt?” Fleming asks.

The rot threaded up Strickland’s arm freezes like sap in winter.

“Except…” Strickland can’t finish.

“I…” Fleming, needing a shield, brings the clipboard to his chest. “I called the general’s office. Right away. I thought—”

The last of his melt is rapid. Strickland’s ears seal off with his own liquefied flesh. The job he’d nearly completed at Occam, everything he’d achieved in the Amazon. All of it had been plenty enough to bargain away the binds roping him to Hoyt. What is it all worth now? Hoyt knows he’s failed him. The career tower Strickland has climbed at Hoyt’s goading is revealed to be a guillotine. Strickland falls from it in two halves and lands in something soft. It’s the slime of a rice paddy. He’s choked by the stench of excrement fertilizer. Deafened by the idiot chortle of passing oxcarts. Oh, God, God, God. He’s back in Korea, where it all began.

Korea, where Hoyt’s job was to guide the southward evacuation of tens of thousands of Koreans, with Strickland as his personal deputy. It was in Yeongdong, where General MacArthur ordered their group to make a stand, that Hoyt collared Strickland, pointed at a truck, and told him to drive. Drive he did, through steaming, silver rain, keeping pace with herons on their lazy, flapping hops from one paddy to the next.

They arrived at a former gold mine halfway filled with squalid clothes. Strickland figured he was to burn them, same as they’d burned so many villages so that the People’s Army of the North couldn’t nab the spoils. Only when Strickland got closer did he see they weren’t clothes. They were bodies. Fifty of them, maybe a hundred. The inside of the mine was pocked with bullet holes. It was the worst of army rumors come true, a massacre of Korean innocents. Hoyt smiled, took gentle hold of Strickland’s rain-slicked neck, and caressed it with his thumb.

“* **** ** * *****,” he said.

When Strickland thinks back on it, Hoyt’s words are but more shrieked redactions. The gist, though, he recalls well enough. A scout had brought word to Hoyt that not all of those dispatched inside of this mine were dead. That was bad for Hoyt. Bad for America. If survivors crawled out and told their story, the US would have a real mess on its hands, wouldn’t it?

Never, ever would Strickland let himself blubber in front of Hoyt. He unslung his rifle. It felt like he was tearing off his own arm. But Hoyt held a finger to his lips, then waved it around in the rain. It was just the two of them out here. Not too wise to draw attention. Hoyt drew from his belt a black-bladed Ka-Bar knife. He held it out to Strickland and winked.

The leather handle squished like putrefied meat in the muggy rain. The bodies were muggy, too, piled five or six deep, the limbs bent and raveled. He rolled a woman out of the way. Brains spilled from a hole in her head. He dug a man from the heap. Intestines spooled out, bright blue. Ten bodies, twenty, thirty. He burrowed into the cold carnage, like tunneling into a corpse’s womb. He was lost, slippery and stinking. Most were dead. But some were, in fact, alive, whispering, maybe begging, probably praying. He cut every throat he found, just to be safe. No one was alive here, he told himself, not even Richard Strickland.

He didn’t trust the sound when he heard it. How do you trust anything in the bowels of hell? But it kept on, a reedy whine, and at the bottom of the pile he found a woman. Dead, but rigor mortis had turned her body into a protective cage for her baby. The baby was alive. Some miracle. Or the opposite of a miracle. Uncovered, the baby began to cry. It was loud, just what Hoyt didn’t want. Strickland tried to wipe the Ka-Bar of hair and gristle so he’d get a clean cut. But he was shaking too much to trust himself. And wasn’t that the point of all of this? To trust? In Hoyt? In violence? In war? That bad was good, that murder was compassion?

There was a puddle. Half rainwater, half blood. Strickland gently pressed the baby’s face into the liquid. Maybe, he prayed, the baby was a miracle. Maybe it could breathe in water. But no such creature existed, not in the whole world. A few twitches and it was over. Strickland, too, wanted his life to be over. He rose to his knees, bodies rolling off his back. Hoyt came to him, cradling Strickland’s head against his round belly and petting his bloody hair. Strickland gave himself over, held on tight. He tried to listen to what Hoyt was saying, but his ears had clogged with blood and tissue.

“**** ***.”

Then it was a whisper; now it is a shriek. What he’d done was an atrocity, a war crime that would be on the front page of every paper in the world if it ever got out, and it would fuse him to Hoyt until one of them was dead. Alone in his Occam office, all these years later, Strickland finally understands. The earsplitting wails of Hoyt’s redactions—how had he missed the connection? They are the screams of the monkeys, one and the same. All his life, primal voices have pushed him to accept the mantle for which he’s been groomed. It is why Deus Brânquia had to be captured. It is why the Jungle-god must destroy the Gill-god. No new deity fully ascends until the old deity is slain. He should have listened to Hoyt all along. The monkeys—don’t be scared by their orders.

Follow them.