“Think of it,” Francis said. “It’s so on-point. Think local. Act … Wait. How does it go again?”

  “You have it,” Delaney assured him. She was tempted to mention that the Every had never paid taxes locally, or in the state, or federally, or anywhere, nor had its founders, and that the paying of taxes might go a long way toward feeding and housing and empowering the unhoused among them, but she would be wasting her breath.

  “Godspeed to you,” she said instead.

  Francis thanked her and did a bit of shadow-boxing. This was new, and it continued. Whenever he was excited, he jabbed and jogged in place. But first Francis needed approval to give away some vast number of free phones and laptops. Delaney was unaware of the Every ever giving away anything, so she was startled when Francis burst into the pod two nights later, breathless and aglow.

  “They approved the phones!” Francis announced, and smacked the wall, producing a triumphant sound. He paced the pod, smiling to himself, looking for other things to smack triumphantly. He pretended to kick Soren in the crotch. “I’m so hyper!” he said.

  Two days later he got word on the laptops. The laptops were a no, but the Every was introducing a new tablet in a month; the Gang of 40 suggested giving the ring-dwellers the first batch.

  “You’re doing it, friend-o,” Joan said, and punched him playfully in the arm. Francis boxed back at her feebly, and then, inexplicably, pretended to kick her in the crotch.

  Delaney was impressed, too. Giving Victor, Glynnis, Ramón, and everyone else living on the perimeter hardware was of course silly, but it was simple-silly, maybe even harmless.

  “Ovals, too,” Francis said the next day.

  “Ovals?” Soren asked. “Why would they want those?”

  Delaney was watching Soren’s conscience come alive, even if just a bit. These sorts of questions—e.g., Why?—were new for him—for anyone on campus.

  “The Gang insists,” Francis said. “The recipients will have to wear them for the machines to work. And I have to say, it makes sense. They’ll get real-time health data, and you have to assume there are some serious health issues among them.”

  Now Francis was bouncing in front of the mirror, jumping rope without a rope. “We’re going to do a photo-op next week. This’ll finally show the Europeans how we deal with the unhoused. Will you all come?”

  “You did the work, sweetums,” Joan said.

  “We’ll watch from afar,” Delaney said.

  “Okay,” Francis said. He jabbed at himself in the mirror, delivered a slow-motion uppercut. “I’ve got to think about what to wear. Do you think we give clothes to Victor and Glynnis? Or just have them be …”

  “Broke? Destitute?” Soren asked.

  “Don’t,” Joan said. “This is good. You know it is.”

  “Is that when they get the hardware?” Soren asked. “At the photo-op?” He slumped into the couch.

  “Nope,” Francis said, “we’re actually bringing the hardware to them tomorrow. No cameras.”

  Soren looked up, his brow knotted in grudging respect.

  “That was Victor’s idea,” Francis continued, “which is brilliant, if you think about it. They get the tablets, phones, and ovals, and then they have a week to get used to the tech, to access services, get some experience. Then, when the cameras come, they’ll already have some familiarity, some anecdotes, and they can describe how it’s all been working for them. Wouldn’t it be great if someone had already gotten a job?”

  “How many are you giving them?” Joan asked. “And I hate to ask a dumb question, but how will they power all this stuff?”

  “Victor said there are 1,137 people living on the ring,” Francis said, “so we got approval for one set for each resident. And we’ll have a solar charging station set up at the end of the week.”

  “Wait. There’s over a thousand people out there?” Soren asked. “I would have said three hundred.”

  Delaney had a strong sense that Victor had made the number up, and had been savvy enough to choose a highly specific number; any hard number was instantly fact, even that number defied what could be surmised with the naked eye.

  “That’s part of the issue,” Francis said. “And the opportunity. Once we distribute the machines, and get the ovals on the wrists, then each resident can register. We’ll confirm their numbers exactly, match them up with official state and federal records, and get a much better sense of everyone’s background and needs. It’ll be like a census, but far more precise.”

  “I hope,” Delaney offered, “that you’ll be tracking their usage once they get up and running?”

  “Of course,” Francis said. “They’ll activate the phones and laptops with their fingerprints, and the prints will go out to the police database, to see about overlap with known offenders and outstanding warrants. The phones, too, will help with tracking—see how often these folks are near, like, spots where crimes are committed.”

  “Finally,” Joan said. “That at least sounds practical.”

  Soren was pacing again. “Why do the police get access to all that again?”

  “Beyond the fact that it will make us all safer?” Francis said. “It was also the only way we could get the city to pay.”

  “Pay for what? The hardware?” Soren asked. “The city paid for the phones and tablets and ovals? That we make?”

  Francis tapped his ear. Soren threw up his hands.

  “The police have a right to some quid pro quo,” Francis said. “And the city has a budget for services for the unhoused.”

  “They should pay,” Joan said. “We didn’t make them homeless.”

  “Houseless. Unhoused,” Francis corrected. “And anyway, the city didn’t pay retail. Just wholesale plus.”

  It was to be done at night. Victor didn’t want Everyones gawking at the distribution, so he’d asked for the delivery to be made after sunset—a plan Francis and the Gang of 40 found agreeable and dignified.

  When the time came, Francis skipped out of the pod, shaking his shoulders like a boxer weaving through the crowd on his way to a title fight. He jogged across the Daisy and to the outer gate. Delaney found a vantage point at the Yelapa Cafeteria, from which she could see Victor and Glynnis’s tent. At just after nine p.m., a few dozen Everyones pushed large dollies through the gate and to the outer ring, where Francis met them. Each dolly was stacked high with phones and tablets and ovals, all in unmarked brown boxes. The train of dollies stopped at Victor’s tent, and Francis and Victor greeted each other like allies and friends. Delaney turned away; she had an inkling what would happen next.

  In the morning, Delaney found Francis on the couch, tapping his tablet, his face pinched.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  “I saw you bring the boxes out there,” she said. “I was really touched. How was the distribution?”

  “Well, Victor and Glynnis did that part,” Francis said. “Victor said it would be better that way, and I agreed. I didn’t want it to be a big show. So we made plans to do some trainings in a few days, and left. I assume they handed out everything in a low-key style.”

  He continued to tap and sigh. “It’s just strange,” he said, “how few of the machines have been activated.”

  Joan stepped out of the bathroom. “How many?” she asked.

  “Sixteen,” Francis said. “Does that seem off?”

  “Out of eleven hundred? I would say so,” Joan said. She opened the fridge and grabbed a mango globe.

  “You think I should go see if they need help?” he asked.

  “Maybe they’re too drunk and high,” Joan laughed.

  Francis tapped again. “The crazy thing is that even Victor’s isn’t activated. Why would that be, do you think?”

  That evening, when there was still no word from Victor, Francis asked Delaney to go with him to the outer ring.

  When they arrived at Victor and Glynnis’s tents, everything seemed in order. Nothing was moved or altered. The recliner was in its place, the 3 ball and 9 ball snug in their armrest homes.

  Francis stood between the tents.

  “Victor?” he called out. “Glynnis?”

  He was oddly respectful of Victor and Glynnis’s privacy, and it took him five minutes to get up the nerve to peek into the larger of the two tents. It was empty. They looked in Ramón’s and found it empty, too.

  “They could just be out and about,” Delaney said.

  She said this while knowing that something was amiss—and confirmed what she had seen coming.

  Francis had never met any of the other ring-dwellers, so it took him some time to build up the nerve to continue down the perimeter to the next cluster of tents. A weatherbeaten woman, wearing on her bare torso only a fleece vest emerged from a half-plywood, half-tent home and squinted into the setting sun.

  “Oh, Victor and his crew left last night,” she said. “They said they’d gotten some delivery work from you guys? I’m thinking they said they were going downstate? Or maybe to Canada.”

  Francis made the sound of an animal caught in a trap.

  “Delivering what?” he asked. “Do you know? Did you see them leave?” He was near tears.

  “All those little brown boxes you guys brought out. Middle of the night, a truck pulled up, and they loaded them in no time. Very efficient. What was in those boxes, anyway?”

  XXXII.

  BECAUSE THERE WAS NO LOCAL NEWS, and the event had not been filmed, word that a small coterie of unhoused people had made off with a half million dollars’ worth of new Every hardware did not spread widely. Still, enough people Everywhere and Nowhere knew, and Delaney held out vague hope that the comic level of incompetence and gullibility displayed would be an embarrassment to the Every.

  But days passed, a week, ten days, and the only chatter was that the remaining ring-dwellers were up in arms that they didn’t get any hardware they could sell, too. Though their protests were muted—only the occasional demand or disgruntlement yelled through the fence—it unsettled the Everyones who liked to walk or jog near the perimeter; they decided to exercise outside of projectile range of the encampment.

  Francis was livid, Soren was devastated, and Joan showed no particular feeling one way or another. Francis worked with the local police department, then the sheriff, the state troopers, and finally the FBI—all to no avail. They had nothing to go on, really, outside of the first names of three unhoused people, and those first names, it turned out, had likely been false. Photos of the truck had been taken as it crossed eastbound on the Bay Bridge, but the driver had been wearing a mask—the face of Popeye, as it turned out—and the license plates had been stolen. There was brief hope that whoever bought the hardware would somehow err in stripping them of their tracking devices and serial numbers, but no such luck—not so far.

  Francis’s anger and investigative zeal gave way to despondence. In the pod, after work, he did his customary watching and murmuring, but with an air of catatonia that was new and unsettling.

  “He’s cooked,” Joan said one day at AYS. “They won’t get rid of him, but he’s at the end of the road. Not that he was climbing the Every ladder at a brisk pace, but now he’s knocked down to private with no hope of ever being more.”

  Not even the coming of the new pod firepits cheered Francis. Wes had doubled down on his assertion that sleeping near an active fire was key to creative fertility. Where were cavepeople sleeping when they invented the wheel? he asked rhetorically. And so all the pods were being retrofitted with firepits, and the unspoken hope was that propane-driven flames would be just as creatively fruitful to Everypersons as woodfires had been to Paleopersons. The research, though, was not yet there.

  At home, Delaney felt for Francis, and hoped for his sake he might leave. He stared into the fire, and Delaney tried to cheer him by reminding him of the pod’s sleep aggregate, which had gone up by 7 percent since the firepit had been installed.

  Francis nodded, said nothing, and continued to stare at the flames.

  The stolen-goods episode shook the dynamics of the pod in other ways, too. Delaney was sure that Soren yearned to have someone to talk to about Joan, and finally, as she was walking back to the pod from work, he caught her in the hallway just before their door.

  “Hi Delaney,” he said, and, with a few mimed gestures, he moved her into a position in the hallway he determined right. “Just a quirk of the building, but happens to be a blind spot. We’re not seen or heard here. As long as we’re quiet and don’t move.”

  “Everything okay?” Delaney asked.

  “I have to be quick,” he said. “I don’t know how much time we’ll have. Now that you’ve been around us a few months, do I seem pathetic with Joan?”

  “Oh,” Delaney said. “I don’t—”

  “Sorry,” he said. “This isn’t fair to spring on you. I know I look like an idiot. I can’t help it. The way I look at her, the way she toys with me. I’m ashamed.”

  “You shouldn’t be. It’s pure. You love her, right?”

  “It’s hardly love. I wait under the table for crumbs. I didn’t mind when it was just us and Francis, because he seems oblivious. But now I see myself in your eyes, and I’m horrified.”

  “No, no,” Delaney said. “It’s fine.”

  It’s fine. That wasn’t right and didn’t help.

  “Have you ever told her?” Delaney asked.

  “Told her what?”

  “That you like her this way,” Delaney said.

  “She knows. She knows a thousand times over. You know she knows. That’s why she plays with me,” he said, rubbing his forehead with his palms. “She owns me but doesn’t want me.”

  “Then maybe you should leave,” Delaney said.

  “What?” he said.

  “You’re too familiar to her now. You’re too available, too easy. Get away. Move out. Make yourself scarce.”

  Soren’s eyes were pained. “What are you saying?”

  The sound of footsteps reaching their floor echoed from near the stairway. Soren listened closely, and when it was clear the feet were Joan’s, he quickly ducked into the pod and avoided Delaney the rest of the night.

  With her pillow over her head, Delaney heard only a muffled version of the sound, later described as a metallic pop followed by a whoosh like an old window thrust open. She heard voices outside her tube, then the rapid tapping of bare feet on concrete floors.

  “Del, get up,” Joan said.

  Delaney shimmied out of her tube and followed Joan into the hall.

  Red EXIT signs on either end of the hallway illuminated the figures running to and fro in a blood-colored light.

  “What is it?” Delaney asked.

  “Explosion, fire, something,” Joan said. “We’re supposed to go to the basement.” Delaney checked the time. It was 3:13.

  A figure swept behind them. “Outside. Go to the Daisy.”

  They came to the stairwell and took the stairs three at a time.

  A man was standing on the landing and contradicted the last directive. “Basement, people, basement! Keep moving. Nice and easy. Get there and wait for an announcement.”

  Delaney had never been to the basement. She didn’t know there was a basement. They took the rest of the stairs quickly, as more sleepers awoke and joined the river of people fleeing downward. At each landing, a handful of people stood, unmoving, staring at their phones, incredulous that there wasn’t more clarity.

  As Delaney and Joan reached the last landing, an announcement came over the speakers. “We’ve had an incident at the northeast corner of campus. Please go to the basement of your building and await further instruction.”

  “The homeless,” Joan said. “It happened out by them.”

  The basement was a warren of pods and small common rooms. Delaney and Joan found a kitchen in the corner of the building and sat on the floor. A woman entered wearing a ghostly white nightgown. “Bomb,” she said, and then wandered out to the hallway.

  “A bomb? Why a bomb?” Joan asked.

  The kitchen grew crowded as the residents of every floor spilled into the basement and filled every corner. They continued to check their phones.

  “I can’t believe there’s nothing,” a man near Delaney said. “No information. It’s been nine minutes. This is insane.”

  “Was it the firepits?” someone asked. A vigorous discussion ensued about whether the firepits in the pods had something to do with the explosion at the perimeter. And with each passing minute of communication blackout, the dread grew more florid.

  “Maybe they cut the power. The towers.”

  “Who? They blew up the satellites, too?” the man said.

  Finally the lights came on. Those who were reading their phones got a series of notices. Stay where you are. Do not leave campus. You are safe. The threat has been neutralized.

  A few minutes later, another message.

  Please do not go to the perimeter. This area is unsafe. No one will be allowed to exit campus for the time being. Please stay where you are.

  Fifteen minutes later, a final message.

  There has been an explosion at the northeast end of campus. Please return to your pods and stay inside your dorms. You are safe there. Police and fire are here and they assure us the threat is over. Try to sleep and we will update you as needed.

  Back in the pod, Francis adopted the role of unflappable elder. “I know this is probably very scary for all of you,” he said, though he seemed strangely unaffected himself. “From everything I’m hearing, this was a very isolated and minor kind of event.”

  “But they said northeast side,” Delaney said. “Wouldn’t that be the houseless perimeter?”

  Francis nodded gravely. “Let’s hope no one was hurt.”

  Delaney studied him. He seemed to know something. Or he was simply gratified that some karmic justice had been visited upon the unhoused humans who had wronged him.

  In the end, Francis’s assessment was not far off. It had been a van carrying a small amount of C-4. It had been driven through an area of the outer fence that was undergoing adjustment and was vulnerable. It was assumed by police and the FBI that the driver intended to drive the van all the way to one of the central Every buildings—most speculated that Mae was the target—but was thwarted when the van’s front axle was split in half by a cement cornerstone that had been there, unnoticed by anyone, since Treasure Island’s Navy days. The van’s driver had abandoned the vehicle and detonated it remotely, perhaps figuring that an explosion at the edge of the campus was better than none at all. Though the conflagration was only twenty yards from the closest tents, no one was hurt at the perimeter, and that was deemed miraculous.