WHEN SARAT RETURNED HOME from Lake Sinclair there was a stranger’s car parked in the driveway, an old fossil-powered sedan. Standing beside it was Attic, the eldest of the Salt Lake Boys.
“Christ,” said Sarat. “I thought they killed you at Fayetteville.”
“Mr. Bragg wants to speak to you,” Attic said. He was as tall as Sarat but thinner, emaciated to the point of appearing sickly. He had dead, distant eyes like his brothers.
“Which one,” said Sarat, “the boy or his father?”
“Mr. Bragg Senior,” said Attic. “He wants to see you and your sister.”
“He doesn’t need to see my sister. Let’s go get it over with.”
“He said he wants to see you and your sister…”
“You deaf or just stupid?” said Sarat, approaching the boy. There was a mechanical quality to him, a sense of removal. “You and I can go, or you can go back to Atlanta alone. Your call.”
They drove west toward the Southern capital. The car had an old radio; Sarat turned the dial. Between bursts of static came dispatches from amateur broadcasters scattered nearby: disembodied Bible reciters; howling cultists preaching apocalypse from the confines of their cabins; madmen squalling into the void. She settled finally on an old man reading a list of names. In the background there played a patriotic Southern hymn Sarat remembered from her childhood. The old man spoke in monotone, barely pausing for breath, and it was impossible to discern whether he was reading the names of martyrs or traitors or simply inventing the names as he went along.
“So what happened to you up in Fayetteville, anyway?” asked Sarat.
“I was captured,” said Attic.
“The Blues got you? And they let you go? Goddamn, you must have spilled your guts and then some. Old man Bragg must love you if he’s keeping the rebels from stringing you up with your pockets in your mouth.”
“I didn’t say a word, and I wasn’t captured by Blues,” said Attic. “I was captured by terrorists.”
It took Sarat a moment to realize he meant the other Southern rebels, the ones who had refused to come under Bragg’s umbrella group. She let out a high cackle.
“You let your own people get you? Holy God! That’s more embarrassing than the Blues just shooting you dead.”
“They’re not my people,” said Attic. “They’re terrorists. Mr. Bragg is my people. I’m free because of him.”
“Terrorists, goddamn,” said Sarat. “That word will work on anybody, won’t it?”
But Attic wasn’t listening. “I didn’t say a word,” he repeated. “I didn’t say a word.”
At the lip of the horizon, veiled with grime, the capital of the South appeared.
A WALL OF TOWERING SLUMS pierced the sky, afloat in haze. The buildings marked the outer edges of Atlanta, a city impossible with size and growing, forever inching outward, metastatic with life.
Once, long ago, its landscape had been inverted. Skyscrapers dominated the downtown core, and beyond them stood the hospitals and the arenas and the sprawling university campuses. Further out, the skyscrapers gave way to the suburbs, lined with strip malls and parks and golf courses and a ring of highways.
Now the tallest buildings belonged to the slums that walled the outer reaches of the city, towers brown and dull as rotting teeth. Within them lived the refuse of the Southern State—refugees from the border towns and from places ravaged at random by the Birds; the poor of the southernmost coast who fled the storms and the scorching heat; soldiers and rebels and people who were born here and whose parents and grandparents were born here, people who knew no other home.
Near the ever-growing slums stood the electronics sweatshops and the shirt factories and the vertical farms. These were huge structures, wider than they were tall. The sweatshops and the factories were made of red brick and the farms were encased in thick glass. The glass was impenetrable to the eye, lacquered from the inside with condensation. Only the reek of manure escaped the walls and clung to the outskirts of the city like a coat of paint. Every dawn and dusk a bleak procession marched from the slums to the sprawling workhouses, and from the workhouses to the slums.
Closer to the heart of the city, the bureaucracy of the Free Southern State—a set of gray, identical buildings—acted as a moat around the innermost core. In the center was the Southern State Capitol; the residences of President Kershaw and of the senior secretaries; as well as the gaudy, gated mansions of the South’s neo-grandees, who owned the sweatshops and the factories and the farms.
Attic drove slowly through the slums. The air smelled of smog and the exhaust of a thousand humming generators. A small group of children ran aside the old fossil car, knowing through instinct that the driver of such a thing must reside above the masses in the hierarchy of the Red. They tapped on the windows and asked for change. An old man limped from one car to the next, selling tissue boxes for five dollars apiece. Lone Star flags hung limp from the balconies overhead as the car inched through the alleys of Little Houston.
It took two hours to get from Sarat’s home in Lincolnton to Atlanta, and another two to get from the outskirts of the city to the core. At the edge of the United Rebels’ compound, the car stopped at a wire-fenced gate manned by a couple of boys in old jungle fatigues. The guards eyed Attic’s passenger with vague disdain. They opened the gate and waved the car through.
It was a simple compound, made up of three squat buildings huddled under a highway overpass. The buildings bore no signage, and at the steps of each sat a few men and boys in plastic chairs, rifles by their sides.
Two of these men ushered Sarat and Attic to the second floor of the middle building. There they sat in a large room that resembled a living area. They waited for half an hour before Bragg Sr. arrived. He was wheeled in by his son and joined by three assistants. Even as Atlanta sweltered, the old man wore a buttoned shirt and a sweater vest, and yet didn’t break a sweat, as though his pores had hardened and dried with time.
His son wheeled him close to Attic and Sarat, and then took a seat in a corner of the room.
Bragg Sr. waved his hand in Attic’s direction, and quickly the boy stood up and left. Then he looked Sarat over from head to toe, a vague, strained look on his face, as though he were reading a book written in a language other than his own.
Finally, he turned to his son. “You’re right,” he said. “Maybe she isn’t really.” His son said nothing.
He turned back to his guest. “So you’re the girl who caused all that mess,” he said. “What’s your name again?”
“Sarat Chestnut.”
“Sarat Chestnut,” Bragg Sr. repeated. “You from the Montgomery Chestnuts? Good people, those. Had a boy named Paul, fought and died in Beaumont early on in the war.”
“No,” said Sarat.
“Her people are from Louisiana,” said Bragg Jr., “down by the Mississippi Sea near Old Orleans.”
“Christ Almighty, she ain’t even from the Red!” said the old man. “The child of swamp people, out on the front firing a gun. Is that what we’ve come to?”
He inched closer to Sarat. “You know, when Albert first told me about you, I thought he was playing games. That’s what he’s always been like, trying to rile everyone up with new things, recruiting more girls than boys. Every few weeks, another pet project.”