The Zoan Front has been flagging. Among other things, it is facing the same problem as all zoan organizations: there simply is no new blood to recruit. True, the first generation of naturally-born zoans is slowly growing in numbers, but the oldest of them are still small children. The factory-grown generation is in its thirties, bereft of the youthful fire that brought new animal-faces to the cause for many years. And while there are humans willing to help during an action, the organization will not, and should not, consider them for membership.
For Samuel Brightlove—he has officially adopted the surname by now—it is a matter of friction. In his heart his passion hasn’t decreased in the slightest, and may even have sharpened and brightened with time, but for the effort he is able to summon and the influence he is able to wield accomplishes less and less. As if he is throwing something, but the air grows thicker and rougher and the same strength gets less and less distance.
It affects everything the Zoan Front does. They are less effective in their community efforts and their covert resistance actions. And in fundraising. Debts mount.
The ZF can’t take out loans or solicit donations through legal means. Their corporate sabotage and redistribution operations have seen them classified as a terrorist group—which the government and media had been eager to do for years. They have had to scrounge, to hire out operatives for illicit work, to borrow from dangerous parties.
When news reaches Samuel of the bombing of the Lans-Cartier MVR station, he scarcely pays attention. It is another disaster, another injustice, one of many that occurred just that day, however sensational it may have been. Samuel cannot take the time to care, he will be smothered by suffering and he will fail his organization.
It is sixteen hours after the explosion that two humans request a parley with the leader of the Zoan Front. They come in suits and sunglasses, nondescript, as close to anonymous as they can be. They need help unloading the aircar that brought them. They have brought more paper money than Samuel has seen in his life, more than he suspected was even in circulation.
They say: Take credit for the MVR station bombing, and this is yours.
They offer no other information, aside from assurances that they are not entrapping him to bring the UN’s full weight down on the ZF. They are earnest, and they are frightened.
Samuel accepts the money. By the end of the day, his face and false statement are being shown on every screen, by every media outlet. He calls in the officers he trusts to help him construct a lie, and the ones he doesn’t to spread it. Soon, the underworld of Terrace believes the Zoan Front had a second cell, which had been preparing for years in secret for this bombing. Even the rank and file of Samuel’s organization believe it.
Samuel is not seen for the next several days. He is not in hiding: he is paying off the Zoan Front’s debts, in person and with great caution. The looks his debtholders give him are varied, they have every kind of suspicion, aroused by this windfall immediately following the bombing. He says nothing to anyone about it.
Though the organization is safely afloat again, not to mention flush with virtually boundless funds, Samuel gets no rest. He is hounded for statements about the bombing, both from daring investigators and from his own people. And the police are after him. The local Terrace Police Department, the North American Bureau of Investigation, and Interpol. He sleeps in a different safehouse every night. It is a miracle he isn’t caught: he suspects interference, by whoever paid him to take credit.
Those in his organization whom he has not trusted with the truth begin to see him with new respect, and awe, and apprehension. They think they must not know him like they thought they did. He must have machinations he doesn’t share. Maybe he is a genius, maybe he is overextending himself, maybe he is dangerous to his own Front.
A loud voice among them is Sike, originally Psyche 133-6R8. The falcon-model zoan has been frustrated for years with what she sees as the Zoan Front’s timidity, a fear of getting its hands dirty to enact real change. She is not impressed by the bombing: one direct action, she accuses, done in secret. She wants to know how it was done, who took part, what other cells does Samuel command. She isn’t alone. She and her supporters among the low-ranked officers harry Samuel and anyone else they can get access to. Their leader doesn’t respond to them.
A week after the explosion, NABI releases an official death count: one thousand, five hundred, and ninety-eight confirmed dead, another two thousand injured. Two hundred unaccounted for, presumed dead. Samuel finds himself looking at the list several times a day, reading a few names before swiping away from it in distress. This is when he sees Geir’s picture.
Obviously his former friend is older, more filled-out and sterner in the face, but the photograph is unmistakably him. Geir 19e9-sr4-6WR7C, zoan, barbatus. Cause of death: incineration. When the shock passes, Samuel is overcome with horror.
He investigates what he can. He finds in public records when and where Geir had volunteered for the workforce, and from there he finds the record of Geir’s employment with Lans-Cartier. Fourteen years in the workforce should comfort him—in the zoan mind, Geir was dead long before the explosion—but it does not. It isn’t ten years ago, when there had not been time for any zoan to have had a life while working. Samuel fears—he knows—that his friend, his love, had been snuffed out, in agony.
Killed by an bombing on which Samuel has very publicly put his own name. Samuel spends a sleepless night assaulted by thoughts of headlines drawing the connection. Of the famous footage showing himself with his avian confidante in the window of the Brightlove House, paired with the vulture’s employee profile from the list of the dead. Of journalists coming to him to ask: Was the bomb a smokescreen to take revenge on a former lover? Did you plant Geir in the MVR station years ago with this plan? How did you convince him to sacrifice himself for you?
After many hours, Samuel knows that he cannot, cannot face any of those possible encounters. He abandons his rest and takes desperate action. There can’t be anything to find.
The fixer he hires demands a prodigious sum. Samuel pays it in cash, up front, with the promise of as much again after if there are no tricks. He stays at the fixer’s side; watches her assemble a team to build the worm that will do what he asks. After several days of work, they send the worm after Geir.
All it does is find and transfer access. It hunts down every record of Geir, every appearance of his photograph in the press, every document about him, every mention of him, across countless exabytes of Internet. And collects the permissions for each one, delivers all to the fixer, who then shows her computer to Samuel, and allows her client to do the honors.
Samuel taps on the button reading yes, and the words and pictures begin to disappear. As fast as the worm is able, it delivers the instruction to the hosts of every scrap of identifying information, to erase them, zero them out, generate whatever fake names or pictures it took to replace them.
When he takes his hand away from the computer, it is already at work removing Geir from existence. He regrets it instantly. His muscles are heavy with shame. But he also knows he is safer now, the chance that he will be confronted is suddenly infinitesimal.
He spends several days verifying its work. Searching for signs of the old news and commentary posts that had included the two of them. They aren’t there. The manufacturer’s record exists still, and some workforce records, but they are corrupted and hard to access. He pays the fixer the rest of what he has promised her. It is just a dent in the sum he was paid to say he had killed his friend.
The Zoan Front loses a number of operatives in the ensuing days, as NABI cracks down. Good fighters and volunteers, probably in prison for the rest of their lives. But it is not as big a blow as it should have been. The story is that the organization committed a heinous act of mass murder, and law enforcement of all stripes is hunting it down. But these are only token arrests. Someone is holding the police back, because they know that too many questions will reveal the truth. Amidst this, the Front’s work has slowed nearly to a halt, out of fear and caution. And because it’s leader has retreated into a cocoon of melancholy and cannot be roused. There is worry, then there is discomfort, and then there is agitation.
The loudest agitator, Sike, threatens openly to splinter the Front. She will take the work into her own hands, do what isn’t being done. She has supporters. They only speak Samuel’s name with disgust. Samuel calls her to his safehouse.
When she comes it is with an ostentatious swagger. She expects to be martyred, to leave chastised and branded and with proof that the old guard fears her. She doesn’t expect to find Samuel sitting at his desk, fingers laced pensively over his muzzle, surrounded by bags stuffed with an enormous sum of paper money.
Take this, he tells her.
They don’t talk long. The falcon never really comes to trust him. But they agree: she will use this money, whose origin he will not reveal but that she probably suspects, to form and fund a revitalized splinter faction of the Zoan Front, and he will do nothing to stop her, so long as she doesn’t move against anyone who stays behind. And as long as she maintains the line that Samuel orchestrated the MVR bombing. When she leaves, he can already see that she is dazzled by the money, but he isn’t going to back out.
For now, he is going to go into hiding. He has more enemies than ever, and he feels utterly incapable of directing his organization. Yet nothing would be more dangerous for them now, he thinks, than for him to step aside. He doesn’t know the nature of the storm he has brought down, but for the time being, all there is to be done is to weather it. And as it is, he isn’t sure he wants to emerge from hiding, back into a world in which he has killed Geir.

***

“But you weren’t at the station,” Samuel met the bird’s eyes for the first time since he had begun to explain.
“I got lucky. A day later, and I would’ve been.”
“Did you think the bombing was me?”
“I had my doubts. But I had to hear it from you.”
“It took you a while to find me. I guess that’s a good sign.”
“I figured if you were blowing up buildings, or if you had a reason to let anyone think you were, then if I picked up where I left off, we’d cross paths eventually.”
Samuel looked down. The ochre fur atop his head, however faded with age and stress, had the same hypnotic texture that had always drawn Geir’s eyes, like rich wheat fields in a breeze. Geir still couldn’t believe they were together again.
“So now what?” his old friend asked.
“There are some people I’ll want you to help out,” Geir shrugged. “I had to break some eggs on the way. If they get a stack of cash they’ll know who it came from.”
The crysocyon smiled bitterly.
“I guess we can put that money to good use,” he said. “Are you going to walk away, now that you have your answer?”
There was no accusation in Samuel’s voice. Both the zoans recognized that Geir leaving the Brightlove House had been…if not the right choice, then a reasonable choice, in a sea of reasonable choices. And the question had been there, wordless, at the edge of Geir’s mind. Maybe ever since he had gotten the ride back to Terrace. He had concertedly resisted asking it.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a plan in my life,” he smiled. “At the moment, that includes plans of walking away.”
Samuel reached a spindly arm across the hall, and they clasped hands. There would be explanations, and revelations, and silences to come; for now there was time just to be together.