Chapter One: Meridian

The grain elevator on the eastern edge of Meridian, Kansas had been visible from twelve miles out on the highway for as long as anyone could remember. It rose from the flat earth like a declaration — white concrete columns against a sky that in summer turned the particular shade of blue that has no name in any language except the one spoken by people who grew up under it. The town itself sat in Osborne County, population 9,840 at the last count, though that number had been a slow bleed downward since the nineties and nobody talked about it much anymore, the way you stop mentioning a wound that isn't healing but isn't killing you either.

It was the kind of place where the high school football team still drew four hundred people on a Friday night, where the Methodist and Lutheran churches stood on opposite corners of the same intersection without irony, and where the co-op grain prices were posted on a physical chalkboard outside Rennick's Feed & Supply because Dale Rennick had decided sometime around 2019 that the internet was more trouble than it was worth and nobody had successfully argued otherwise. There was a Dairy Queen, a Casey's General Store, a Family Dollar, and a diner called Patsy's that had been called Patsy's through three different owners, none of them named Patsy.

The year was 2031.

President Vance was nine months into his second term, having won the previous November in the kind of electoral map that cable news spent three days trying to explain and rural Kansas didn't need explained at all. The RESTORE Act had restructured federal agricultural subsidies for the third time in six years. Broadband had finally, genuinely reached Osborne County — real broadband, not the apologetic satellite service that used to drop during thunderstorms. The nearest city of any consequence was Salina, forty-five minutes south, and most people made the trip once a week if they needed to and avoided it if they didn't.

This was the town where Caitlin Morozov-Burke had grown up.

She was twenty-three years old and had her mother's cheekbones — sharp and architectural, the kind that photographed well and in person made her look like she was either very beautiful or very tired, sometimes both simultaneously. Her hair was dark auburn, which she'd inherited from some collision between her father's Irish genes and her mother's Slavic ones, and her eyes were a grey-green that her mother called morskoy — sea-colored — on the rare occasions Irina Morozov-Burke reached for sentiment. She was five-foot-six and had the unconscious habit of standing with her arms crossed, not out of hostility but out of a lifetime of being the kind of person who took up exactly as much space as she needed and not one inch more.

Her father, Patrick Burke, had roots in Meridian going back four generations. His great-great-grandfather had come over from County Clare with nothing but a last name that was common enough to be suspicious and a willingness to work soil that other men found discouraging. The Burkes had farmed the same quarter-section since 1902. Patrick himself had added a welding business in the early 2000s, which had kept the family solvent through the years when farming alone wouldn't have. He was broad-shouldered, quietly religious, and possessed of the specific stubbornness that manifests in midwestern men not as aggression but as an absolute inability to change his mind once it had been made up, which he considered a virtue and Caitlin had considered, from approximately age fourteen onward, a personal affliction visited upon her specifically.

Her mother, Irina, had arrived in Meridian in 2001 via a path that the town had never quite fully processed: born in Voronezh, raised in a family of engineers, she had come to the United States on a graduate exchange program at Kansas State, met Patrick Burke at a bar in Manhattan — Manhattan, Kansas — and had made the decision to stay with the calm, analytical efficiency that characterized everything she did. She spoke English without much accent anymore, though it thickened when she was angry or tired. She made borscht at Christmas alongside the Burke family's soda bread, and she had never once, in thirty years, explained herself to anyone in Meridian who seemed to require an explanation.

Caitlin had inherited, with interest, her mother's refusal to explain herself.

The decision had started with Tyler.

She didn't like to think of it that way — didn't like to think of Tyler Krause as the reason for anything, because that gave him a significance she had spent eight months systematically dismantling. But the honest version, the one she told herself at two in the morning when the dishonest versions had all run out of steam, was that the trajectory had begun in the parking lot of the Salina Applebee's on a Thursday evening in October of 2030, when Tyler had ended their two-year relationship with the specific cowardice of a man who had decided what he was going to do approximately three weeks before he got around to doing it, and had spent those three weeks being subtly unkind in ways that left no evidence.

She had driven home from Salina on a two-lane highway with the flat dark Kansas landscape running past her windows and something consolidating in her chest that wasn't quite grief and wasn't quite rage but had elements of both, and she had thought, with a clarity that surprised her: I need to be somewhere that has absolutely nothing to do with any of this.

Not Salina. Not Wichita. Not even Denver or Kansas City, where she'd briefly imagined moving after finishing her associate's degree at the community college in Smith Center. Those were all just larger versions of the same geography, the same social architecture, the same faces at a greater density. She had wanted to be somewhere so fundamentally different that the contrast itself would be a kind of answer.

She had spent the following three weeks doing what she always did when she needed to think: researching with the focused intensity of someone who has decided on a conclusion and is looking for reasons that are good enough to stand behind it. She had looked at programs in Europe first — France, the Netherlands, Scotland, which had the added pull of meaning something to her father. She'd looked at South America. She'd looked at Japan.

She had landed, with a finality that surprised even her, on Malaysia.

The Universiti Teknologi MARA had an international exchange program in their communications faculty. The program was legitimate, the scholarship partially covered it, and Kuala Lumpur was approximately nine thousand miles from Osborne County, Kansas. It was a Muslim-majority country. It was in Southeast Asia. It was, by almost any metric available to a twenty-three-year-old woman standing in her childhood bedroom in the middle of America, as far from Tyler Krause and Meridian, Kansas as it was physically possible to get while remaining on the surface of the same planet.

She had applied in November. She had been accepted in January.

She had told her parents in February, over dinner, on a Sunday, which in retrospect she recognized as a miscalculation. Sundays had a weight to them in the Burke house. Her father's guard was never lower than on a Sunday evening, which meant, she realized too late, that his distress was also never more unguarded.

Her mother had set down her fork.

Not dramatically. Irina Morozov-Burke did not do things dramatically. She simply placed the fork against the rim of her plate with the deliberate care of a woman who has decided she needs both hands free for what comes next, and looked at her daughter across the table with an expression that Caitlin could not immediately read, which was unusual. She could generally read her mother.

"Malaysia," her mother said.

"Yes."

"You said Malaysia."

"That's what I said."

Her father had not put down his fork. He was still holding it, though he'd stopped eating. He was looking at a point somewhere near the center of the table.

"The country," her mother continued.

"There's only one."

"Caitlin." This was her father. His voice had the texture it got when he was working to keep it level. "Walk me through this."

"I sent you both the program information. The email I sent—"

"I read the email," he said. "Walk me through it anyway."

She walked them through it. The program, the faculty, the duration — ten months, starting in August. The scholarship, partial, the rest of which she had already determined she could cover with her savings from the three years she'd worked at the veterinary clinic in Downs. The academic credit, which would transfer. She had prepared for this conversation. She had notes, in her head if not on paper.

When she finished, the kitchen was quiet enough that the refrigerator's compressor clicking on was audible.

"It's a Muslim country," her father said.

"I know that."

"Majority Muslim."

"Sixty-three percent, yes."

He looked at her then. "That's not—I'm not saying that's a problem, I want to be precise here—I'm saying you have never, to my knowledge, expressed a single interest in that part of the world. You've never studied the language. You don't know anyone there. You have no — " he searched for the word "— no connection to that place."

"I know."

"So help me understand why there."

She had prepared an answer for this. It was a good answer, technically accurate, about the communications program and the particular kind of cross-cultural media studies focus that the faculty offered, and how it would complement the coursework she had already completed. She delivered it with conviction.

Her mother listened to it with the expression of someone listening to a closing argument that has several holes in it that she is choosing not to identify yet.

"You've looked at this seriously," her mother said, when she'd finished.

"Yes."

"Since when?"

"November."

"November." Her mother picked up her fork again, then put it back down. "You've been carrying this since November and you're telling us in February."

"I wanted to be sure before I—"

"You wanted to be accepted before you told us," her mother said. Not accusatory. Simply correct.

Caitlin didn't answer, which was its own kind of answer.

Her father pushed back from the table slightly. He had a way of creating physical distance when he needed to think, as though putting eighteen inches of air between himself and the problem gave him a better angle on it. "Do you know what the State Department says about—"

"I've read the travel advisory. It's a Level One. Exercise normal precautions. Same as France. Same as Japan."

"It's not the same as France."

"In terms of the advisory level, it is precisely the same as France."

"Caitlin." His voice had dropped. This was the register she'd grown up understanding as the one that meant I am not arguing with you, I am telling you something. "You are a young woman. You are going alone. You would be in a country where you don't know anyone, you don't speak the language—"

"They speak English. It's one of the official languages. The program is conducted in English."

"—where you have no family, no community, no—"

"Dad."

"—nothing to catch you if something goes wrong."

The sentence landed and sat there between them. She understood what he meant by it. She understood that the thing he was describing was not a specific danger but a general one — the danger of distance itself, of his daughter being somewhere so far from him that his ability to intervene in her life, which he had never fully relinquished in twenty-three years, would be reduced to zero.

"Nothing's going to go wrong," she said.

He looked at her with the expression of a man who has heard this sentence before, from people he loved, in the past tense.

Her mother had been quiet for a moment. Then she said, in a tone that was careful in a different way than her father's, "Is there something you're running from?"

The question dropped into the room with a weight that was disproportionate to its eleven words.

"No," Caitlin said.

Her mother looked at her.

"I'm running toward something," Caitlin said. "There's a difference."

Irina Morozov-Burke had come to Kansas from Voronezh at twenty-six years old, had built a life in a place that had not entirely known what to do with her for the better part of a decade, and had done it with a quality of self-possession that Caitlin had grown up watching the way you watch a performance of something difficult and make mental notes. She was not, on principle, opposed to radical displacement as a life strategy. This was perhaps why, when she finally spoke, what she said was not no.

What she said was: "August is six months away. We have time to talk about this properly."

Which was, from Irina Morozov-Burke, almost an opening.

Her father picked up his fork. Set it down again. Looked out the kitchen window at the February dark beyond the glass, where the yard light illuminated a pale circle of frozen ground and the barn roof and nothing beyond that for miles.

"Malaysia," he said again, to no one in particular, as though if he said it enough times it would begin to make a different kind of sense.

Outside, the Kansas wind moved across the plain with the patience of something that has been moving for a very long time and has no plans to stop.

The fire in the study had been burning for three hours and showed no interest in stopping.

It was the kind of fire that large stone hearths in old houses produce when they have been doing so for centuries and have developed an opinion about it — steady, authoritative, generating a heat that the room absorbed into its walls and its floors and its heavy furnishings with the patience of stone that has been warm before and expects to be warm again. The hearth itself was carved from a single piece of Black Forest granite, the carving so old that whatever it had once depicted had been worn by time into suggestion rather than image — shapes that might have been figures, or animals, or something that was neither.

The room around it was large without being ostentatious, which was a distinction that required a particular kind of age to understand. The ostentatious display of wealth is the project of those who have recently acquired it. What filled this room was different — the accumulated density of centuries of object and material, each piece present because it had survived rather than because it had been chosen, the surviving being its own form of curation. Bookshelves running floor to ceiling on two walls, the books on them not organized by any system a librarian would recognize but by some other principle entirely — proximity, perhaps, or association, or the memory of the hands that had last held them. A desk of such age and mass that it appeared to have grown from the floor rather than been placed upon it. Two chairs before the fire, deep and dark, the leather of them worked to a softness that takes longer than a human lifetime to achieve.

The windows were tall and uncurtained, looking out onto the forest, which in the November dark pressed itself against the glass with the familiarity of something that had been outside this house since before the house had a name for what was outside it. Occasionally the wind moved the upper branches and the movement was visible against the lesser dark of the sky, and occasionally it was not the wind.

The two figures in the chairs were not remarkable to look at, which was itself remarkable, given what they were. They had the appearance of men in late middle age — one heavier, one slight, both possessed of the particular stillness that living things accumulate when they have had sufficient time to conclude that most motion is unnecessary. They had been in these chairs, or chairs like them in rooms like this one, for longer than the language in which they were now speaking had existed.

The heavier one held something in his lap. It was neither book nor device — a broad, flat panel of material that was not quite leather and not quite wood, its surface covered in markings that moved with the quality of things that are recorded rather than written, that exist because they are true rather than because someone has chosen to put them there. He had been consulting it for some time.

"The American line," he said. "Burke. Irish extraction, significant dilution over four generations. The girl is twenty-three. Kansas." He said the last word with the mild neutrality of someone for whom American geography is a recent and not entirely compelling development. "Middle of the country. Farming land."

The slight one was looking at the fire. "Dilution to what degree."

"Sufficient to expect dormancy. The physical markers are present but faint. No reported expression of capacity. No incidents on record. No indicators of any kind." He paused, reviewing. "Nothing."

"Remove her."

"That was my inclination." The heavier one moved to do so — a gesture of the hand above the surface, the kind of gesture that has weight behind it, that means something in the grammar of what these two were.

"Wait."

The hand stopped.

The slight one had not moved. He was still looking at the fire, his expression unchanged, his posture unchanged. But something in the quality of his attention had shifted — had turned, without his body following it, toward the panel in the other's lap.

"Show me the entry."

The heavier one turned the panel. The slight one did not lean forward to look at it. He simply looked at it from where he sat, which was sufficient.

A long moment passed. The fire held its own counsel.

"There's nothing there, Aldric," the heavier one said. "I've reviewed it three times."

"I know there's nothing there."

"Then—"

"That's what I'm looking at." The slight one's voice was quiet and had the quality of a man choosing his words with the care of someone who has learned that precision is the difference between being understood and being dismissed. "Not what's there. What isn't."

The heavier one looked at the panel again with the patience of someone re-examining a conclusion they are confident in. "The absence of expression is not—"

"The absence is wrong," Aldric said. "The lineage is weak, yes. Diluted, yes. By those metrics she should show nothing, and nothing is what she shows." He paused. "But this is a different nothing."

Silence. The fire. The forest against the glass.

"You're asking me to justify that to the full council."

"I'm asking you to leave her on the list."

"On the basis of an instinct."

"On the basis of forty-one decades of instinct," Aldric said, without inflection, as though the number were unremarkable, which to him it was. "Leave her on the list. She warrants watching."

The heavier one looked at him for a moment with the expression of a man who has disagreed with this particular colleague before and has the historical record to know how those disagreements have resolved. He made the gesture again, differently this time. The markings on the panel shifted.

She stayed.

"She's in the interior," he said, reading. "A small place. Nine thousand people." A pause, the faint register of someone finding this mildly improbable. "Nothing ever comes from places like that."

Aldric was quiet for a moment, his eyes on the fire. Then: "Things that come from nowhere are the ones worth watching."

The heavier one closed the panel. The matter, for tonight, was concluded.

Outside, the Black Forest moved in the November wind, dark and deep and old beyond the accounting of the men inside, though the men inside came close.