She had been working as an administrator in tech for the best part of a decade, since losing the floral dresses, starting her life over, and getting her education. She was familiar with high-pressure environments centered around a charismatic leader with a vision of the future most other people couldn’t understand. She was practiced at keeping her head amid the chaos, doing what needed to be done. She was perfectly suited to a life in tech start-ups and she went to a lot of parties like this one.

  One of the venture capitalist investors in GardenGlow, the start-up she was working for, had brought her to this particular party. GardenGlow was going down the tubes: burn rate too high, subscriptions too low—that was how most start-ups ended. But Dean, the VC, had been impressed by Martha, told her she was the only good thing in a bad company. So he took her to a party with “a bunch of founders, interesting people” and she understood that was about introducing her to entrepreneurs and finding her next position. Seek and go find.

  Martha was drawn to the kitchen by the sound of shouting. That was what you got from growing up Enochite—run toward the trouble. It took her a few seconds to understand the situation. The host was shouting at the caterer. The caterer was trying to defend herself. And at the edge of the room, his long body tense and half leaning against the counter, was Lenk Sketlish. He did not look like a man who was comfortable at a party.

  Lenk watched the argument like a tuning fork, vibrating.

  The host shouted: “This is unacceptable. Everyone will hear about this. Believe me, I know people.”

  From the corner of a box on the kitchen island, a thin line of blood trickled down the side of the counter. Lenk watched the red meandering rivulet like a cat watches a mousehole.

  Martha knew Lenk Sketlish by sight. She scanned the technology news every day and Fantail was big business. They’d taken their first huge funding round, more than $300 million. His board was trying to lever him out. He was tall and lean and twenty-eight years old, prone to sudden rage, as tightly wound as a mousetrap. Everyone wanted to know whether Lenk Sketlish could hold his business together.

  Lenk was staring at the box. The dribble of blood had almost reached the floor.

  The host was shouting. “What kind of idiot are you? I said prepared, ready for the barbecue! Outdoor life. That’s the theme! New England seasonal outdoor barbecue, ready to grill.”

  Why was no one looking in the box?

  Martha lifted the lid.

  Two dozen dead rabbits, stretched along the length of the box, all intact. Whiskers and fur, paws and claws, dead black eyes rimmed with blood. Stacked neatly, like a mass grave.

  The party host said: “Someone just needs to deal with this mess.”

  The caterer said: “The hygiene license states—”

  They were good rabbits and not yet even quite cold. Someone in the woods had likely shot fifty this afternoon and sent only the best dozen to this party.

  Martha said: “I can prep them for you.”

  The host said: “Who the hell are you?”

  Martha introduced herself, keeping Lenk Sketlish in the corner of her eye as he kept her in the corner of his. There was something mesmerizing about him. She thought: I know you. I know this feeling.

  Martha took a knife from the block, wrapped the first rabbit in a thick dishcloth, nicked the skin, and found the neck bones with the edge of her blade. Worked the edge through the vertebrae. Put all her weight on the back of the knife. With a sharp crunch the head separated from the body.

  “I’m gonna be sick,” said a woman’s voice. “I am serious, I’m gonna barf.”

  Martha said: “Tip your head back, gulp air in.”

  She cut the four paws off swiftly. One, two, three, four: crunch, crunch went the knife, crunch squish.

  The room had become very silent.

  Someone said: “Not so lucky for the rabbit,” but there was no answering laugh.

  Martha opened the abdomen delicately but quickly and pulled out the viscera. Her dad would have used them for stew. It’s an insult to the animal, he’d said, not to use every part. She wondered whether the host would let her take the hearts home, and how he’d look at her if she asked. She felt that, for a moment, she was back in the woods, checking the traps and breaking the backs of the animals and hurling the steaming guts to the dogs. That she had never left Enoch at all and all her life since then had been a dream.

  There was a round of applause when she finished the first rabbit and presented it as they might have seen at the butcher’s, a product of the plastic world of illusion, not the real earth of muck and blood and disorder and death. They were impressed but—she could tell—a little repulsed. Except for Lenk Sketlish. He was alive as a plucked string. She had the sudden instinct that if she’d thrown him the rabbit’s heart, he’d have caught it in his teeth and been her hound forever.

  Someone drew breath to speak. She knew they were going to say, “Where did you learn that?” but Lenk Sketlish stole the breath from their lungs. He said: “Can you teach me?”

  The host sent them into the garden. It was dead winter, as cold as it gets in the valley. Lenk nicked the bowel of the first rabbit he tried, the thick scent of shit rising in their steam-cloud breath, and Lenk said, “Oh fuck” and his knife slipped and he cut the nail of his left index finger almost through. They washed the wound together—like a mother with a child, like a new lover. She held his hand to steady it, showing him how to keep his knife constantly moving, pushing in and moving on, again and again.

  She had read this about him—that he had some fascination with backwoods skills. It had made her laugh at the time because, yeah, a lot of rich people want to pretend to be poor people. Or comfort themselves that they could live like poor people if they had to.

  Lenk Sketlish had never been poor. He’d grown up comfortably upper-middle class, his dad a senior manager in telecommunications, his mom a dermatologist. There was no special trauma in his childhood—journalists digging around were just about able to find that his dad had had high standards and his mom had marked his schoolwork herself with a round red pen. They’d lived in a good neighborhood, he’d attended the local high school, where he’d been neither well-liked nor particularly unpopular. He’d had an aptitude for coding and an absolute inability to work for anyone else or on anything he wasn’t personally both interested in and invested in. He played a lot of racquetball, he loved to win. He saw that social media had space for a streamlined platform centered around video, audio, and image remixing and he loved to win. His parents loaned him $50,000 to start a business and let him know he shouldn’t waste it or expect more. When asked, he said he built his company like he played racquetball with his dad—going hard and fast, no quarter asked or given.

  Martha thought: He’s going to try to sleep with me. She’d have to nip that in the bud pretty fast. But she’d always managed to turn a shoulder to those approaches in a way that didn’t insult. As his clumsy knife chewed up the rabbit fur, she felt tender toward him and his insatiable urge to conquer as she’d sometimes felt tender toward Enoch, and she knew that this in itself was a skill. She knew Lenk Sketlish already, as she’d known Enoch. He was prone to fits of rage and frustration, he was extremely intelligent in some ways and extremely stupid in others, and he didn’t suffer fools gladly but never recognized when he himself was the fool. Not many people figured out how to feel tender toward Lenk Sketlish.

  At some point he said: “So, Girl Scout camp?”

  “Grew up a fundamentalist preparing for the end of days.”

  And he’d said: “That is cool. That is so fucking cool.”

  Later on he asked her what she did now, and when she told him, a slow smile moved across his face, and a bark of laughter forced its way out.

  Martha thought: Yes, I know you, and yes, I know what this will mean, and yes.

  There had been a thing the Fantail board had been asking him to do for months. He’d always said absolutely not, how fucking dare you, do you think I need a fucking nanny? He didn’t need anyone; he was Fantail. He’d talked this way to the board, and that had slowly but inexorably screwed him. There was a limit to where good ideas could get you if you treated the offer of help as an insult. Ellen Bywater had recently been installed at Medlar after the founder, Albert Dabrowski, had been edged out. This was the logic now: you can’t expect the guy who comes up with the thing to steer it around the corners when it picks up speed. Stuff his mouth with gold and show him the door.

  So it was a surprise to the board when, the next day, he asked for a short list of candidates for the assistant job. Someone who’d done this kind of job before at a start-up. He described, without naming it, the company Martha Einkorn worked for as the type of place they should look. Maybe a gardening start-up, something like that. A list was made and Martha Einkorn was on it. Martha Einkorn came to interview. And in the fullness of many days Martha Einkorn was appointed Lenk Sketlish’s personal administrator, company secretary, guardian, emissary, holder of boundaries, giver of guidance, paid companion, counselor, and friend.

  Her first morning he’d said: “Hey, so. What kind of religious fundamentalist?”

  She’d looked him directly in the eye and said: “Enochite.”

  6. he’s never killed anyone directly

  It was 4:09 a.m. in San Francisco and ntd/strategic was going crazy. More and more people waking up on the East Coast, trying crazy shit to find ArturoMegadog. She had to say something.

  I found him, she said. I got lucky. Drove around till I saw something that reminded me of a picture he showed me of the view from his house. He’s OK. He says thank you to everyone. Paramedics are with him now, but he’s already thrown up most of what he took.

  The forum was thrilled and relieved except for three douchebags who said she had ruined their night’s sleep and she should have kept them updated as she was traveling and told them about the picture. Further members of the forum told the douchebags they were the reason society was going to collapse. Then there was a long game of “no, you are” until sometime just before dawn ArturoMegadog’s original post deleted itself. At which point the argument, instead of dissolving, became more entrenched the less the people involved knew about its origins.

  Albert took small sips of coffee, wincing slightly. Martha tried to remember the last time she’d seen him. At a fundraiser maybe, and maybe he’d been drunk. She remembered now knowing he was gay and that he had a partner who never came to any of these events and didn’t want to be involved in any of the media of it.

  Albert said suddenly: “I never sent you any photo. How did you know it was this house?”

  There was a pause, and she stared at the floor and the ceiling and the rows of books, wondering whether to tell him the truth.

  She said, “Fantail. You can do it without knowing someone’s real name if you have high-level access. Advertising filters. You like this brand of kimchi, you live near water in San Francisco, you were thinking of having a child, you were married to a man who worked for a car company that had been bought up by Fantail—that narrowed it down. And then… you’d made purchases that you described from GreenTrunk and TogBuzz, and we own both of those now. I got an address. It didn’t say Albert Dabrowski. It said Mike McCall.”

  Albert laughed properly at that, a deep belly laugh that turned into coughing.

  “I knew it,” he said at last. “I fucking knew Lenk was doing shit like this. Collecting all that data, saying they wouldn’t use it, but once you have it… it’s trivial to do stuff like that.”

  Albert scratched his ear with a shaking hand.

  “My husband’s name was Mike,” he said. “The house was in his name. He liked me before I came up with Medlar, when I was twenty and arrogant as shit, a brain on legs. He was the first man who ever thought I shone. He never told anyone he worked with who I was. He didn’t want to be treated special. So he didn’t get treated special.”

  “If Lenk had known who he was, they’d have kept his pension,” said Martha, but Albert looked at her so pityingly that she was ashamed.

  “Please,” he said, “please will you leave now? I’ll forget you were here, you’ll forget you met me. You saved my life, OK? You saved my fucking life and I’ll go get some help and you and Lenk and Fantail advertising filters get one good mark in your ledger, OK? I won’t put it on Name The Day.”

  “If I leave,” said Martha, “do you have someone you can call to take my place? Someone you can tell what happened here, honestly.”

  The washer whirred in the closet down the hall.

  “My sister’s in Napa,” said Albert.

  “And?”

  Something animated in Albert. A chance to tell a story he’d told before, a sliver of the person he usually was.

  “Well, she’s a grade A bitch. She doesn’t even have the excuse of Jesus. She goes to church but not one of those churches. They have a hot thirty-two-year-old minister who plays the saxophone. But still, whatever you do, she thinks you’re doing it wrong. Not you. Me.”

  “So… you’re not going to call her.”

  “For a while I’ve really been a problem for her because, you know, dead husband—she can’t compete in the suffering Olympics. But this… she’d say there’s no way to do grief wrong, but also she would make it clear that taking a bunch of pills and a bottle of bourbon is the wrong way to do it.”

  “Fuck her, then,” said Martha. “Never see her again, never talk to her again, what’s the fucking point?”

  Albert looked at her. “OK. You really are OneCorn.

  “Tell me something,” he said. “You just came to a stranger’s house and saved his life. That has to mean something about who you are deep down. What the shit are you doing working for Lenk Sketlish?”

  “He’s not the worst person in the world.”

  Albert looked at her and slowly raised an eyebrow. This was the ArturoMegadog she knew. It couldn’t be helped: some part of the people they’d been online was bleeding through here.

  “He’s not an arms manufacturer,” said Martha, “he’s not a drug dealer, he’s not in the mob, he’s never killed anyone.”

  “Oh really,” said Albert, and she remembered the pensions and his husband.

  “Fuck, sorry. But I mean he’s never killed anyone directly. There are plenty of worse people.”

  “You’re not selling it.”

  “They do bring people together, that is true. People meet on Fantail. They talk.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I liked you online,” said Albert.

  “I like you,” said Martha.

  “The person I know online is passionate about the world, about doing the right thing. She’s funny and acerbic and she knows her Bible and I guess, like… I just imagined you’d be working for an NGO on child poverty. The way you talk. That’s it. The way you talk, I didn’t think you’d be helping Lenk Sketlish strip-mine human sanity for coins.”

  Martha drew breath to answer but Albert wasn’t finished.

  “Because you know that’s what he’s doing. If you were anyone else on that board, I’d think, OK, fine, she gets it on a personal level but not on a societal level. But you know. He’s deliberately making people angry and desperate so he can keep them clicking. He’s taking data that doesn’t belong to him and using it to fund stupid fucking shit like his ‘undersea base’? I blame myself every day for getting thrown out of Medlar; I wanted that company to be an example of how to do it right, and I pushed too hard and the money wanted me out. And that was it, my one big idea. You get one fucking life, Martha Einkorn, and I should know—I’m in extra time over here and I think I get to say whatever I like. You get one fucking life, and you’re smart and you have insight and energy and courage and you’re using all that to help Lenk Sketlish?”

  7. the faint scent of apples

  There was a point when Martha had believed in what Lenk and his company were doing. Fantail presented itself as a meeting place—“the community where friends meet friends” was the slogan they discarded in her first year. But Martha understood that what they were selling was a product that divided the world up into tinier and more perfectly polished fragments. They were selling pieces.

  In those early days, this idea excited her. The pieces that Enoch had told her were forbidden. The pieces that she’d come to see could bring comfort were an intense and important part of the world he’d denied her. She loved it. She had fought a bear and won. Somewhere in the dark woods of Oregon were the bones of a bear she had brought down with her own hands, the flesh turning to rot, the rot feeding fungi and tree roots, the trees giving homes to insects, the insects feeding the birds, the birds flying overhead calling loud and wild. That was pieces too, she said to the imagined ghost of her father. This thing Fantail was making was the beautiful pieces. In her imagination he turned his face from her when she said this, and in her imagination she smiled. Anything that wasn’t Enoch was good.

  It had taken more than two years—long hours, home after midnight, takeout in the office, she and Lenk laboring together to save him and to save his company. They came close to the brink six or seven times. She pulled in favors from people she’d worked with across Silicon Valley to get the bugs fixed faster than the users could rage-quit over them. When a major launch failed to meet its milestones and their next payment wasn’t triggered in time, they were only one payroll from going under, and Martha took partial salary plus stock, and Lenk didn’t take his salary at all to keep paying the devs. He sold his condo and slept on her couch for three months until the next payment came through. He was angry and driven; he stayed up at night coding and sending emails and writing up ideas. He woke her sometimes late at night with a thought, just to hear her tell him it was great. Other people in the company said to her often that they didn’t know how she put up with it.

  Eventually the company stabilized and the board congratulated Lenk—and, more quietly, Martha. It was only then, after the great rushing wave had crashed over them, that she thought of using Fantail herself. Of looking, perhaps, to find the Enochites. Why would an Enochite have a Fantail profile? Perhaps because they, too, had left that world behind. It had been more than fifteen years since the Last Sermon. Some of them would surely have returned to their previous lives.