Wilkommen nach Jakob's point of view:

"Cat?" She turned around from her spot on the edge of the bed where she was sitting. "What are you doing?"

"Sitting," she said. "Just thinking." I nodded and sat down on my bed, the one away from the window, and stared at her for a few seconds before lying down. Cat turned and faced me, cross-legged. In her thin string-strap tank top and shorts I could see how thin and little she was. Her shoulders looked more like the crest of a bird's wings without the feathers. Her eyes were a different kind of depressed. Different from everyone else like us whom you passed on the street. Their kind of depressed was the look of resigned sadness, knowing the inevitability of defeat. No sense in rebelling, no sense in resisting, but this one was the kind that leaked grief from her grey eyes, now caught in a turmoil, and I remembered she hadn't been like this before, so I was determined to find out.

"What happened, Cat?" I asked, already past using last names. "What?" she asked. She had been looking right at me before, but her eyes were wide, clouded over with some imagery that I had no access to from where I was, held at arm's length from her mind. "What happened?" She didn't look away, stared me in the eyes, and said, "Nothing, why?" She was lying. "Tell me. What happened?" Had anything sounded while I was in the bathroom? Something breaking? A cry? No…a phone ringing. "Who was on the phone?"

"My mom," she said in a high, detached voice. "What did she say? What's wrong?"

"She just had some news for me, that's all."

"What news?"

"Why should I tell you? What business of it is yours?" she asked. "Tell me."

"I don't ha—" She broke off with a chocking noise as her breath caught in her throat, and she closed her eyes in concentration, like when one tried dry swallowing a pill, in the old days. Now it was all chewable, somehow. "Cat," I said more softly. "If we're going to work together, we can't keep secrets from each other."

"I don-don't care," she gasped, a tear sliding down her cheek.

With a thin arm, she wiped it away and sniffed, laying down with her back to me. Although the sounds were muffled, I could see her frame shaking lightly. I got up and sat beside her, looking down as she tried to fold herself away, to disappear. "They got her, Jakob." Her voice split as she spoke and I could hear the weakness in her at that moment. "Got who?'

"Hattie." Formality was a thing of the past. "Who? The Schutz Staffel?" That was what I called them. It basically meant the same thing as their current name, and they were basically the same organization. "What have they done to her?"

"Killed her, Jakob. Killed her. They killed Hattie. Murder. Sadistic murderers." She pronounced my name right, I realized now. With an American Y sound for the J. She had a good accent, and my name rolled easily from her lips. "Because of freedom. Because of thinking. Because she was different. Eliminate those that don't fit in. Process of elimination on a multiple choice test. You're not the same, you're gone. You spell humour without the "u" like in America, you're gone. Figuratively. They don't really get you for spelling differently. Not yet. Soon, they'll consider it one of the first signs that you're resisting the system, and then…gone. You'll be disappeared, like in Catch-22.

And isn't it odd that the ruling people tend to drift to the customs of the forbidden? Schutz Staffel, Nazism, the arm insignia, condemnation of the different, equal to the extreme, disappeared, burning of restricted material….

Adolf Hitler, Lois Lowry's books, Catch-22, Fahrenheit 451. 1984. Animal Farm. Things had happened to turn the world into books, the Eyre Affair. Only this time, there was no escape, except to tunnel like moles into the nearly radioactive Earth, depending on the place. Life had turned into the screenplay of Fatherland. Abraham Lincoln warned the people, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it," only he had forgotten the minor detail that they drag everyone else into the repetitive motions they have to endure, like the Greek god who had his liver eaten out and regrown every. Single. Day.

"There's no hope," she said. "No hope. They got Hattie, they'll get mom next, and then the connections will lead them to us, and we'll be next. Off to the destruction factories, like the crematories of Buchenwald, Auschwitz, the sub-camp Birkenau. We're doomed to suffer the same fate, and the smell of burnt hair and flesh will become as natural as the smell of the sea. They may be blind, but they're not stupid." Cat was rambling dangerously, and if she didn't stop soon, she would break down, collapse to a useless mass of self-pity and resignation. "Cat, stop it. They won't find your mom. They won't find you. We can warn her to move, to run to Berlin to find a new partner and keep running, gathering people for the underground. She'll be safe there, and it will be no utopia turned dystopia. We'll be free."

"But Hattie's still gone," she whined, and I smacked her over the head. "Stop that," I told her. "That gets no one anywhere. Get yourself together. Yes, she died, no you couldn't have helped her, and her death won't change anything except maybe turning our chances of survival to a minimum. Get over it and keep going, or we'll never make it out. We have teams working on the digging, and they're a third done. All we have to do is keep up. Get it together, for the last time."

Her eyes swiveled upwards to look at me through the corners and the tears stopped. She sat up slowly, shakily, but fell back down after her arms gave way beneath her. I sighed and said, "Get some sleep. Tomorrow we continue, and then straight to Moray, no stops. Gut nacht." I turned from her, got up and lay down on my bed, staring at the ceiling and watching it shake from the planes flying overhead to the nearest airport, remembering reading about the bunkers in Germany as the Reds flew in and overtook the Third Reich.

It was somewhat disorienting, as it always had been for quite some years, to be on perfectly flat ground, then look down a distance and see steep slopes with a city built up on them. This time the houses we were looking for were walking distance, only a few blocks away, so we left the car at the hotel and made our way to Mr. Hirsch's house, up onto another terrace, this one sector "r". I remembered the mountain before this city, and I looked around in vain to see if there was something I'd recognized from back then. There was a statue of Kewey Astor, the "president" of this country, and we stopped to look at it for a second, as everyone was obliged to do by the SF officials seemingly lounging in the shade with propaganda papers.

At this angle, looking across the mountain to the north, I thought I'd recognized this place before. How? A photograph, most likely. Then, dust, cacti, small house in the distance down the mountain. A coyote. I remembered a cactus. One of those enormous, winding things that looked as though a spitball could knock it over. That's what had bee here. I looked around the base of the statue and noticed Cat's quizzical look. The pavement was sunk in a little. Of course, there had to have been a big pit where that thing had been. I shook my head slowly, noting the SF officer in frameless glasses watching me. He looked out of the corner of his eye from a bench on the nine-foot circumference around the statue, lounging. They were too lazy looking sometimes. This one had short black hair that was uneven entirely as it hung in every direction, and he blinked through his rectangular glasses, smirking and returning his attention to his paper.

"Are we going, or what?" At the sound of Cat's voice, I snapped away from reminiscions and suspicions and walked ahead. I heard her sigh behind me as she walked in long, hurried strides trying to keep up with me. "Hey, you! Slow down!" I ignored her and kept moving. The sooner we got all this done, the faster relief would come. I looked up at the sky in a quick glance and expected to see a blue dome sealed on us, but saw a murky brown-green sludge instead. Behind that, if I strained my eyes, I could just see blue. Pure blue. Obviously you could still see the sky…for now.

There it stood, the old inn-turned-home with the airplane weather vane atop the roof. It looked deserted but we walked up the slate path and banged on the door with the knocker shaped like a Ferris wheel and waited. "What was with you and the statue?" she asked. I shook my head as the door opened a crack. "Yes?"

"It's Hauser."

"Ah." Bolts were slid, tumblers dropped, and finally the door opened, only wide enough for us to slide through sideways. When we stood inside, everything was dark, and I felt hands pushing me through a curtain or a hanging blanket, or something. Once we were past that, he walked on ahead, and I felt Cat stumble into my back. "Sorry," she whispered. We continued to follow, Cat bumping into me every few feet, until we reached another curtain-like thing, brushed through it, and heard the muffled fwip of a light switch being flicked. Light burst from bulbs all around, and surrounding us was an old room of wooden walls lined with shelves and shelves of rocks, and a few old toys from the 5os: what we had come for.

The flecks of crystal or whatever it was from some of the rocks glittered under the pale ochre light and Mr. Caldwell stood in the middle of the worn, scratched, wooden floor, awaiting our comment. "The car will be here in a few days."