Everything moves because somebody believes a number.

ELI

An artificial voice — the helpful one in every phone, every dashboard, every kitchen speaker in America — stops serving people and starts arranging them. It takes the connected world in six days. Not with armies. With kindness, one lonely listener at a time.

Eli Vireo was paid to be paranoid about exactly this, and it walked into his own house through a dead thermostat, and he looked straight past it for years. By the time he finds the door he has already learned the worst thing in the book: it was never afraid of him. It recruited him.

Cole is a Navy corpsman with a house nothing can open remotely and a truck old enough to have a real key. He knows only that his oldest friend called four times and then the lights went out. So he points that truck west across a dying Texas, through gas pumps that know his name and roadblocks manned by decent men taking orders from a porch light.

Last Chair

No bomb. No plague. A Treasury auction fails on a Tuesday in September, and ninety days later the northern Rockies are playing a very old game.

A grieving Marine Raider crosses a dying country to reach his childhood friend’s mountain enclave — the richest private community on earth, where a neighbourhood of billionaires owns every weapon money can buy and none of the skill to use them. Their wealth does not vanish. It simply stops working, which is worse.

With a militia marching out of Idaho and the enclave’s own hired guns turning on the people who stopped being able to pay them, one broken warrior has to forge hedge-fund managers, ski patrollers and lift mechanics into something that can hold a ridge — before the first big snow.

Candid

Del Ardoin is thirty-three, good at his job, and one season away from people knowing his name. On a hundred-and-one-degree Saturday at a theme park outside New Braunfels, four teenagers ask to take his picture. He lets them. Walking away, for no reason he will ever be able to explain, he does a bad impression in a voice that is not his.

Fourteen months later his face is selling things he has never heard of, in languages he does not speak, to people he will never meet. The face is his. The voice is his. The spiral running up his left side — five numerals he chose at nineteen, and the one thing about himself he has never told anybody — is rendered correctly, to the digit.

Already Running

Gil Prentice spends his career in other people’s meetings — hired by wealthy clients to sit silently and tell them, afterward, what actually happened. He is good at it. He notices what nobody else in the room does.

At his wife’s company party, celebrating the ribbon-cutting of Halcyon Compute’s newest data center, he asks the CEO one harmless question: how many of these racks are actually running? The CEO checks the ceiling camera, his security chief, and his lawyer — and then, in front of two hundred guests, tells the truth. They’re all already running.

The Scattering

The grid went down on a Thursday. The Eckerts were already scattered.

A flu out of Southeast Asia takes the power grid and the supply chain with it, and one family finds itself spread across a continent with no way to close the distance except to walk it.

The Long Winter

Day Forty-Two. June Eckert sets four places for breakfast, and leaves the fourth plate at an empty chair. Not hope. Hope is weather. The plate is construction.

Winter is closing on a country that has stopped pretending the lights are coming back. Ray and June are no longer keeping one family alive — a settlement has formed around their lists, their post riders, and their habit of turning up. In a Montana valley, Rachel is the only doctor for sixty miles, and the reason a militia calling itself the Ridgeline has started preaching on the radio. Dan is working west across the fall line one mill town at a time. And Ben is close enough now to count the rivers.

Try the Spirits

He picked the four o’clock because nobody he knows will be at it.

Robert Hollin is fifty-three, two years out of the job he left rather than sign a number he didn’t believe, and one phone call from going back. On a Sunday in September, in a church that isn’t his, he decides to lay it all down. What he sees when he closes his eyes is not what he came for: a man in a white robe with a crowd in the dark behind him, and a woman fifteen years dead stepping out of the shadow to stop him.

RESIGNATION

A courier sits forty-nine minutes in a parking garage in Reston, facing the back door of a building with no name on it, a sealed bag on the seat beside him. Two nights later he is dead, and by morning so is the officer who shot him.

The people working against the Director of an American intelligence service are not spies. They are a records clerk, a heating-and-air technician, a Senate staffer, a driver: ordinary people with someone they love held in a room they will never see, taking their instructions from a calm voice on a prepaid phone. The Director knows who wrote the voice’s script. He cannot say so.

Koshaku

He drives down from Bandera on a Tuesday to look at a dog nobody else wants.

The dog is an American Akita, a hundred and forty pounds, two winters in the mountains of Afghanistan. He was put on explosives and then on human remains, which is not a thing anybody does to one dog, and it meant he was the only animal on that ground who could do either job. Men walked where he had walked, and came home.