“But a couple of the younger mothers and I said: ‘This is going to get worse. So much worse.’ And we got ourselves together, went out after dark, and just walked. Babies on our backs, all the way to Vesvere.”

  “I’m so sorry,” May said.

  “And then a few years later, there was an investigation. For show, of course. But it helped us put together what actually happened. That officials and liaisons had taken bribes from neighboring countries to stop people from advancing farther inland. Stall anyone coming from the coasts, and you could get a nice little sum to retire on. There was never any proof, of course—but you have to wonder how much Rait Belen cleared for every man who got on one of those buses and never turned up again. Enough, I’m sure, to buy his way here and set himself and his family up at the Morningside. And what will we do? We can’t go back there now. He knows I recognized him.”

  “Are you sure it’s him?” May asked.

  “Of course I am. Ten years is a long time in this wretched world—but you don’t forget a face like that.”

  * * *

  —

  My mother was tired, so May set her up in the bedroom. I stayed at the table. The red light above May’s desk was still blinking. It made me nervous. I got up to let the blood back into my limbs, and I went along his bookshelf, mouthing the titles quietly to myself, feeling smug that I had been right. Of course there would be this many books. He dressed like a man who liked them. He had left his closet door open a crack, and I pressed it just a little wider, expecting to see that salmon-colored linen coat I knew so well. But there were no clothes in there at all—just a bunch of old-looking machines. They were humming.

  When May finally emerged from the bedroom, I said: “All this stuff. It’s like you’re the Dispatcher or something.”

  He laughed. Because, of course, he was. And he’d mistakenly assumed I’d known it from the moment we’d walked in.

  So there I sat through the remnants of a night that had only grown stranger and stranger, watching May run his pirate radio station from a tiny desk in the building that had once been his grandfather’s antiques store. The Dispatcher. One two three. Between calls, he let me ask questions. Is it really you? Yes. Is this how you knew about the fire at the Morningside? Yes. Do you have any help? No. When do you sleep? Whenever I can. Why do this? I’ll tell you sometime. Every now and again, I closed my eyes and put my head down and listened for the similarity between the voice he used in real life and the voice I’d been hearing on the radio for months. It just didn’t sound the same. That was part of the spell he had woven, and not even knowing the truth could break it.

  In the morning, he let a couple of hours of music play and was out on Battle Hill before I was even up, sitting on a low wall, pretending to do nothing when Mila’s father came walking by. He brought back photos on his tablet. He and I sat comparing them to the few snapshots available online from Rait Belen’s military days. The passing years had stacked comfortable weight on him, but the flat blue eyes looked the same.

  “It’s him,” I whispered.

  “Are we sure?” May said.

  “Of course—just look at him.”

  He shook his head. “I still can’t get my head around how he got here unnoticed. All the steps it took to get here, all the people who saw him, and she’s the only one to recognize him? How is that possible?”

  He didn’t know my mother yet, so he didn’t understand that the story itself was proof enough. She had gone my whole life without breathing a word of it. Nothing about my father, nothing about Rait Belen, nothing about buses or the textile factory or her journey before or after them. The great, rushing force of what she knew had followed her everywhere we went. It had followed me, too, even though I neither recognized it nor knew its name. And then, in a place she had finally felt relaxed enough to call home, it had caught up to her at her moment of greatest vulnerability, forcing her to relive it and call it what it was.

  It couldn’t all be for nothing.

  While we tried to figure out what to do, the three of us settled into an uneasy routine, playing musical chairs with the bed and sofa and reeling from our respective terrors. Whenever I felt too cooped up, I went up to the roof, where May’s enormous old antenna stood among the abandoned buildings, invisible to everyone except the rook cranes nesting next door. My mother did not go outside, except to stand in the little courtyard behind May’s brownstone and look around at the boarded-up back-building windows and the rotted laundry lines twitching overhead. Whenever May ventured out for supplies, she added some item essential for our getaway to his list. Flashlights. Water. A tank of emergency fuel. He brought them home one by one, but they just piled up in the corner while we played cards and he wrangled callers long into the night.

  My mother kept insisting, “We’ll be on our way soon.”

  “No rush,” May always said. “I don’t mind the company.”

  Where exactly did she think we were going to go? We had no people anywhere. And as she kept reminding me, mostly in order to remind herself, Popovich would soon realize that we had disappeared. He would let himself into our place. And then the few things we had in the world would be at his mercy.

  Beanie’s maps. Ena’s albums. I imagined Popovich standing there while movers wrestled my cot out the door; he would find the jam jar, open it, grimace at its contents. Then he’d toss it into the trash without a second thought, never realizing what it actually was, or what it had meant to us.

  Plagued by these thoughts, I went back to the Morningside one afternoon while my mother napped. May was moderating a heated debate about the reintroduction of the city’s old motto and didn’t see me slip out and into the street.

  I was pleased to find that my old gate key still worked. There was nobody in the courtyard. No one in the lobby, either. I stood at the desk, with its empty chair, unable to decide what to go for first. The scissors? The jam jar? Which one would I stay up nights thinking about, if I was seen sneaking around and had to make a break for it?

  The scissors were older. I’d carried them around with me since Paraiso. But the jam jar—it was all I had of Ena. And the apartment was so full of her things, so full of Beanie’s. Maybe it was more important to get up there and grab everything and anything I could.

  I got as far as the mezzanine when I heard that familiar, crisp step somewhere behind me. Too late, I ducked into the service stairwell. I was down a flight and a half when a door somewhere above me opened, and Mila’s voice fell in all around me: “Sil? Sil!” But I didn’t look up, not even when she started after me, her footsteps quick and light on the stairs. “Sil, I can see that it’s you! Where have you been? Wait!” Some vein in my chest fluttered at the lack of control in her voice, the growing urgency. How strange to have her on the back foot for once. But there was nothing to do but keep descending, even when it sounded like she was leaping down after me three steps at a time. Into the basement, into the superintendent’s office, where I shut the door and locked it behind me. The radio was still on in there, murmuring softly. Of course it was. No one had been down here during our absence. I cranked the dial to drown out the sound of my breathlessness, and the Dispatcher’s voice—May’s voice—filled the room around me so that I could barely hear what Mila was yelling while she banged on the door.

  “I’m just saying,” a thin-voiced caller insisted. “I’m not surprised they’re being investigated.”

  “I don’t disagree with you,” May said. “But not for the reasons you think.”

  Mila kicked the door again. “I’m not leaving, Sil.”

  Suit yourself, I wanted to say. I sat down and put my face on my knees and imagined myself in the thick hum of May’s makeshift office.

  “Don’t tell me,” the caller said.

  “No—look. I think it’s important that all this stuff is coming out about the Repopulation Program. And it should be investigated. But more on my mind is the question of why. Why do things like this happen. Why does every step we take forward have to be followed up with some predictably human setback. It’s like we don’t know the fight’s already over or something.”

  “That’s a real shitty thing to say, Dispatcher.”

  “I guess it is.” May paused. “If you tune in to this station, you know I don’t like to tell stories myself much. I want to hear yours. I want to let you hear each other. I worry that most stories I know aren’t mine to tell. But listen. The other day, a caller notified me about a man who had moved into our neighborhood. This man—well. He’s wanted. A criminal.”

  “What, like a thief?”

  Imagine May, taking a deep breath, shaking off the ghost of his younger self. May, on every radio in Island City, and yet totally alone. All those old fears and misgivings obliterated in a single moment of self-recovery.

  “No,” I heard him say. “A real criminal. War crimes. His name is Rait Belen. Look him up. He did things so terrible it sickens me to even mention his name. Anyway, the other day my friend recognized him just walking down the street. And I’ve been wondering ever since: What made him choose this city? Of all the places he could have gone in this world, he decided to hide out here.”

  Imagine my mother, sitting up at the mention of Rait Belen’s name. Confused, frowning. Sticking her head around the bedroom door to look at May at his desk. I was surprised not to hear her in the background. Please, I thought, let her sleep through this.

  “See?” the caller was saying. “Another Repopulation failure. How did he get in, you know?”

  “I know how he got in,” May said. “That part’s no mystery. All he had to do was pay the right person to get him the right papers with a fake name, and then he was nothing but another white man looking for a better life for his family. The Repopulation Program didn’t have anything to do with it. And sure, people here made assumptions about him. They thought, ‘War.’ They thought, ‘Poor guy.’ But they imagined themselves into his struggles, and they did not think, ‘Killer.’ My point is not the how. It’s the why. I’m asking why such a person would choose to come here?”

  It struck me that I could hear more clearly now that Mila had stopped pounding on the door.

  May was still talking: “What made him so confident that he could come here and just live his life? Walk outside among ordinary people, go about his day, stand in line for rations with the rest of us? Did he really think nobody would recognize him? Or did he feel sure that even if somebody did—we wouldn’t care?” May paused for such a long time I almost moved the dial to see if I’d lost the feed. Then he took a deep breath and continued: “If it’s the latter, well. If it’s the latter, alas poor city, what have we become?”

  “You ought to report him,” the caller said.

  “I’m not sure how much good that would do.”

  “But people gotta know, don’t they? Isn’t he dangerous? What does he look like? Where does he live?”

  I turned down the volume.

  “You knew,” I said through the door. “You knew exactly what he was.”

  Silence from beyond the door. I slid forward on my hands and knees and looked underneath, and then I got up and unlocked the door. There was no sign of Mila.

  By the time I got back to West Park Place, my mother and May had already gone through whatever fight his on-air revelation had provoked. They both looked exhausted.

  “He told the whole city,” my mother said.

  “I know.” I looked at May.

  “I had to, Snoopy,” he said. “You know that.”

  “I don’t think it was your story to tell.”

  “Maybe not.” He shrugged. “But this is my city.”

  And so it was.

  We settled into a period of waiting, though what for I really don’t know. My mother seemed to think it was retribution. She felt certain that Rait Belen or one of his cronies would show up at the door in the middle of the night and murder us all. May didn’t seem entirely immune to this possibility. He started going out for rations less often, always a little nervous that he might not come back. My mother was constantly reassuring him that we would leave any day now.

  But we were still there a week later when a caller named Adi brought the conversation back to Mila’s wretched father.

  “You know,” she said, “I looked up that bastard you were talking about, the war criminal.”

  “Rait Belen,” May said.

  “You weren’t joking—he’s accused of some horrific things.”

  “He is.”

  “So I was in Battle Hill the other day, and I passed a man who looked exactly like him. And for a moment, I thought I must be going out of my mind, or was just really shook by the fact that I had been reading so much about him and looking at his pictures. But then I remembered—the reason I was looking him up to begin with was because you said you thought he might be living in the city.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Well, Dispatcher, it’s definitely him.”

  I sat down next to May, taking great care not to make a sound.

  “I’m sorry to hear it confirmed,” May said.

  “And he’s just walking around up-island, like it’s no big deal.” May started to say something, but Adi kept going: “Anyway, I followed him, kind of in a daze because I couldn’t believe it. He went into Ricky’s Hardware. Then I got a chill. There I was, just following this man who might be responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. What was I thinking? But then I thought, ‘To hell with him. What is he going to do? Kill me?’ So I waited for him to come out and then I followed him home. Do you know he lives at the Morningside? The Morningside?” She sounded absolutely outraged. “That building has been there since before I was born. It’s old Island City. Moira Watanabe died in that building. She was my favorite writer. When word got out, you couldn’t wade through all the bouquets her mourners had left behind. And now this son of a bitch calls it home. I had a couple of eggs in my ration bag and, Dispatcher, I couldn’t help myself. He went in through the gate, and when he turned around to close it behind him I hit him in the face with one of my eggs as hard as I could.”

  “Jesus, Adi,” May said, shooting me an appalled stare. “Your rations.”

  “It was worth it,” Adi said. “You would’ve done the same thing. And you know what? I hope I’m not the last person to do it.”

  She certainly wasn’t. She knew her fellow up-islanders well. Later that same day, a Zoe Yoon phoned in from the North End to say that she had called out after a man she was pretty sure was Rait Belen. “I just walked behind him and yelled his name until he ducked into a store,” she said.

  Over the next week, a deluge of neighborhood vigilantes reported similar confrontations. You wouldn’t bother calling in about the usual stuff: Rait Belen was the center of life in Battle Hill, if not the entire upper city. He was suddenly on every corner, in every store, taking a blissful afternoon nap on a sunlit bench in every park. “Christ,” May said, after one caller detailed following him for blocks, shouting Murderer, “you’d think by now he’d give up going outside.” It happened so much that May had to remind people that they’d want to be extremely sure the person they were harrying was indeed Rait Belen, and not some unfortunate look-alike. This prompted a rough-voiced man to call in with just such a problem. “Listen,” he said. “I am not Rait Belen—my name is Daniel Leigh. In the last week, I’ve had a lemon and a bunch of tomatoes thrown at me, and I’ve had enough.”

  “Stop wasting your rations,” May told his listeners. “Do not throw food at strangers.”

  To make sure they had the right person, a small coalition of lookouts took to camping outside the Morningside to track Belen’s movements and redirect newcomers, who by then were coming up from different neighborhoods to try to get a glimpse of him so that they could have something to call in about.

  One day, I recognized Ricky’s voice on the line. “I know the man you’re talking about,” he said. “He comes in to my store all the time. And I’ve refused him rations twice now.”

  That prompted a call from the sheriff, who reminded us that merchants were not allowed to refuse rations to someone with a valid card. Ricky called back while the sheriff was still on the air to argue that it was not a valid card, goddamn it, because the name printed on it was Grigor Tozen, and since he knew the bearer to actually be Rait Belen, he was under no obligation to honor the scrip.

  All this while, I kept looking at my mother. I wanted to know whether this cannonade of enthusiastic abuse to which Rait Belen was being treated was eroding her fear.

  “Did you ever think people would rally like this?” I said. “Isn’t it amazing?”

  But she was insistent: “Something terrible is going to happen.”

  And it did.

  May returned from a walk with an old neighborhood friend looking like he’d been turned inside out.

  “What’s wrong?” my mother said, the moment she saw him. “What’s the matter?”

  Mila had vanished. The news was already old, because the prevailing theory at first had been that she had run away. But now, four wasted days later, it had changed to kidnapping, though no ransom demand had been made public.