Twice I thought I noticed vehicles following us, hanging behind us even as we crawled along—a beat-up gray van when we were still in Philadelphia and a newer sedan while crossing into New Jersey.
But before I mentioned either sighting to Rex, they faded into the traffic and disappeared. I told myself I was probably just being paranoid, but I’d been paranoid before, and I’d been followed before, too. I kept an eye on the rearview but didn’t see anyone else.
I turned my thoughts to Ogden. I was anxious about meeting someone who might have been involved in the bombing, who might have played a part in killing all those people. Thinking about it, I got so upset that I wondered if I’d even be able to speak to him. As impossible as it seemed, I knew I’d have to put my anger out of my mind, at least while I was there. If I couldn’t, it wasn’t going to be a very productive conversation.
The bridge let us off in the middle of the zurbs. The zurbs in Jersey tended to be in better shape than the ones outside of Philly. Or rather, the ones still on dry land were. A lot of the others were simply gone, sunk into the swamps or reclaimed by the river to the west or the ocean to the east. But where we were driving, things seemed pretty intact at first.
We made good time up until the last mile or so, which took longer than the rest of the trip. Like a lot of towns in that part of Jersey, much of Pedricktown had been flooded or washed out entirely by the river years earlier, so we had to try several different approaches before we found a road piled high enough with gravel and crushed shells to form a passable causeway. All the false starts and turnarounds left me confident that even if someone had been following us earlier, they weren’t any longer.
On either side of us, abandoned houses and businesses were sinking into the muck, but when we finally turned onto the street leading to Ogden’s squat, it was high and dry, or at least dry. The land was flat, lined with brown grasses and low, scrubby trees.
At the end of the block, a narrow three-story wooden house overlooked a broad swath of swamp. Several rows of portable solar panels stretched off to the left of it, their wheels sunk several inches into the soil.
Ogden was standing on the porch, chewing on a toothpick. As we got out of the car, he flicked it into the swamp. The sun was hot, and the buzz of insects was loud.
Ogden looked just like his picture, but lankier than I expected. He put his hands in his pockets and came halfway down the steps as we approached. He didn’t look like a terrorist.
“Rex,” he said, tipping his head in greeting.
“Ogden,” Rex replied.
Ogden looked at me and said, “Nonk.” It was a bit of a slur, short for “nonchimera,” but he said it in the same tone he’d said “Rex,” seemingly without malice.
“Really?” Rex said, annoyed and disappointed.
Ogden shrugged without taking his hands out of his pockets.
“My name’s Jimi,” I said, stepping forward and putting out my hand.
He looked at it for a second, then took two slow steps down and shook it. “Ogden,” he said.
“Nice to meet you,” I said with exaggerated politeness.
He snorted as he turned and went back up the steps. “Come on in,” he said, over his shoulder.
We followed him up onto the porch and into the house. It was dark and faintly musty, but not too bad. That close to the swamp, it could have been a mess.
Ogden led us into the kitchen, which was worn but also bright and clean. At the far end there was a metal table with chipped white enamel paint surrounded by four mismatched metal chairs and windows on three sides looking out over the swamp.
Ogden sat in one of the chairs and gestured toward the others.
“So, what do you want to talk about?” he asked as we sat.
“You’re with CLAD now,” Rex said.
Ogden was quiet for two seconds, one to stare at Rex and one to stare at me. “I might be,” he said. “Why?”
Rex turned to me and I leaned forward in my seat.
Why did you kill all those people? I thought, but that’s not what I said. “My full name is Jimi Corcoran.”
“I know who you are.”
“Right, well, apparently a lot of people in CLAD know who I am. I want to know why.”
He shrugged. “You’ve been on the news, you’re active with E4E, et cetera. I’m sure a lot of people know who you are.”
“In the last four months, the FBI has been to my house. Twice.” He stiffened when I said it, and I felt somehow gratified. “First they wanted to know what I knew about CLAD, saying that CLAD members had been talking about me. More recently, members of CLAD abducted me off the street while I was on my way to that lunch meeting that was bombed.”
He tilted his head as he stared at me, a hint of a sneer on his lips. “You were going to the meeting? With all the H4Hers?”
“And E4E, yes.” I looked into his eyes, trying to see if they matched any of the eyes that had peered at me through their masks in the van. I was pretty sure he hadn’t been there.
“Well, I wasn’t part of that,” he said, looking down. “But I’m sorry about your friends.”
I didn’t say anything.
“So, someone intercepted you on your way there?” he continued. “How do you know they were with CLAD?”
“Do you know someone named Cronos?”
His face froze for an instant, then he started laughing.
“What?” I asked.
“You met Cronos?”
“That’s what he said his name was.”
The smile fell away from his face. He glanced at Rex, then back at me. “You’re serious.”
“So why would they care about me?” I asked. “The FBI keeps asking, and I want to know before they do.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Like I said, you’re known. A minor celebrity for the cause and all that. Which could be handy. Cronos keeps a pretty low profile, but you’ve also seen some action, and seen firsthand what we’re up against. We need people; maybe he’s hoping you’ll join us.”
“So I can blow up buildings and kill people? Not a chance.”
“No, so you can help take down Wells, take down the Wellplant network and with it, H4H. And we’re not just ‘killing people.’ We’re taking down the enemies of chimeras. Before they can kill us.”
“‘Enemies of chimeras’? Are you serious? There were people from E4E in that blast. They were not all enemies of chimeras.”
“Maybe they were collaborators, then. I don’t know. Like I said, I wasn’t in on that. But don’t be so sure you know all about E4E, or Chimerica even.”
Rex sat up straighter. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Ogden laughed. “Come on, you know as well as I do that getting them to actually do anything is damn near impossible. Why do you think that is?”
“Because they don’t blow people up for trying to have a dialogue?” I demanded.
“No,” Ogden shot back. “Because they don’t do anything. Not a damn thing. And you know it yourself. I heard about Omnicare, about how you told people at Chimerica what was going on at that hospital and they refused to help. Why do you think that is?”
He had a point, although I wasn’t going to concede it.