D | Terminal Cruise

DA: Remiel had no idea where she was, but it seemed to be, simultaneously, an ultramodern medical clinic and a shabby prison. The doctors and nurses who attended her used four quick punches on a sixteen digit keypad to get back out. But in odd places nails stuck right through the walls. There were no windows but she could hear construction outside that only ceased at night. After months of captivity she began to hear a strange shout in her head that was silent, yet still somehow sounded like Dory’s voice. There was much back-and-forth, but at last Remy convinced herself she was not cracking up from the isolation. The Academy called such abilities “Mercies” but Remiel was always skeptical of them. Now, free to converse on Doryphone, she was a little hurt that her cousin had never revealed her talent before, and she said so. 𝗜 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝘁 𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴. 𝗘𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆. “I wonder what your brother can do for me.” She knew if anyone was listening they would assume she was talking about her own brother, not Elroy.
DB: 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗹𝗼𝗮𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗳𝗶𝘀𝗵𝗲𝘀? 𝗘𝗹𝗿𝗼𝘆 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝘁 𝗼𝗳𝗳. Remiel considered that, and remembered Elroy’s coin trick at her father’s funeral. She said, “I don’t think he can help me, given the circumstances.” 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗸 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘃𝗼𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗶𝗻𝗴. Remy framed her thoughts to say, “I need to talk to whoever is in charge of this clown show,” and it seemed to work. At least, Dory had no more advice on technique. Remiel went on strike and offered no cooperation with her captors whatsoever. She said no words and just sat in the clinic all day doing nothing. There were two ways of killing time that seemed to be available to her now. By an act of will Remiel let the clock race and her heartbeats seemed to hum. She sped up, cruised for a while, then slowed back down. Four hours were burned up in as many minutes. But she really didn’t like the feeling of her heart buzzing, so she switched to a series of hour-long naps in the uttermost depths of sleep, not even dreaming.
DC: After four meals, two showers, and stops to use the restroom and drink water Remiel had a rather busy day that compressed a full week of real time. She was ready to keep going, but she didn’t have to. The lunatic in the asylum had won. Dr. Trochmann called in FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Claude Colson, who identified himself to Remiel and said he wanted a heart-to-heart talk. “Fine,” she said, “start by telling me all about this place.” “You are under the jurisdiction of a branch of the Department of Justice called DECON, which means Domestic Enemies Containment, Observation, and Neutralization.” And Remiel grew angry at that. “Domestic enemies? You must be joking. My father lost an arm fighting the Hun in the previous war. My mother was a Red Cross nurse Over There. Every Sunday morning at the Temple I get on the piano and pound out a rip-roaring rendition of 𝘎𝘰𝘥 𝘉𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢.” Colson said, “FDR signed an Executive Order that could be read, very loosely, as offering a response to your strange contagion.”
DD: “You’re not afraid to talk to me face-to-face,” Remiel pointed out. “And Doc Troch and Nurse Ramsey ain’t so scared either.” But Colson had an answer ready. “If it was transmitted by coughing or sneezing you would be behind glass. We know it’s not airborne but we’d like to know how it does spread.” “Okay, I get why you won’t unlock the door. You want to study this thing. But I don’t even know where I am.” “You’re not all that far from Havilah, actually. Just one state over, in fact, near Cody. This is the Heart Mountain Relocation Center.” 𝗘𝘅𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝘁! said Dory. 𝗪𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂. And then Remiel knew Dory had access to her senses as well as her thoughts. She said, “What are the odds? Professor Cassiel gave a lecture about this place right before I came here. But I think I’m in the wrong camp. My great-great-granddaddy was German!” Colson wagged a finger. “You’re not here for your ethnicity, it’s your condition that makes you an undesirable.” Remiel snorted with indignation. “An undesirable!”
DE: “The President’s order is the kind of gift that comes around only once in a generation,” said Colson. “Strike while the iron is hot, they always say.” Remiel said, “Maybe I’m one of your undesirables but I don’t feel sick.” “It’s not just the wings. Your brain isn’t even alive anymore!” “Then how could we be having this conversation?” “Dr. Trochmann, would you tell the young lady what we’ve learned?” “Yes sir. It seems to slowly remodel neurons. Your brain cells are now little gadgets with sliding levers and such. You’ve been hooked up to a Dynograph and it shows nothing. Legally, you’re brain dead! We think it was caused by a new Nazi weapon.” “I don’t like either of you very much,” said Remiel, “but you’ve made it abundantly clear that you want something. OK! I want something too. The window you’ve disguised as a mirror must be blocked out on my side.” The doctor played dumb. Remiel thought maybe for him that wasn’t too difficult. “Mirror?” Remiel was disappointed. These men assumed she was clueless.
DF: “I have a lot of spare time locked up in here. Naturally I found your filthy one-way peeping Tom mirror for you and your people to look in on me day and night.” “I can see there is no fooling you.” Remiel said, “Sometimes my cousin calls me a scrub. I know she’s only kidding. But Agent Colson, I’ll match a scrub at the Academy against any A student at the publics anywhere.” Colson tried to defend the arrangement he had made. “The mirror is not used for what you think. This is a medical facility. No one has a prurient interest in seeing you undressed.” “Look, maybe you have an order to hold me in this quarantine of yours, fine, but I’m seventeen and I still have the right to plain old-fashioned privacy!” Colson thought about it for a few heartbeats and settled on a new tack. He said, “Remiel, I want to apologize for starting out on the wrong foot.” He sounded sincere. Perhaps he even was sincere. “Then let’s begin once more,” she told him. “Give me a little peace of mind and I will be more forthcoming.”
DG: Remiel saw how the mood of the men brightened at this apparent breakthrough. “OK!” said Colson. “Curtains on your side of the mirrors and we’ll start again.” That evening she took a closer look at the keypad near the door. There were sixteen buttons with ten numerals and the first six letters. She knew it would probably take all night for a solid week to do it, but as with her earlier “strike” she somehow had the motivation and the patience to do it. Remiel started punching the numbers in sequence starting at ⓪⓪⓪⓪. As soon as she began to do that, something like a daydream began to assemble in her mind. It was very vivid and came without her bidding. She imagined it was four nights later, and ⓽ⒹⒻⒸ was the winning number. Just for the devil of it she tried that combination and the door popped open. Green. Go. She was free to leave the building. Still, it was November and she was wearing nothing but slippers and a hospital gown. That itself was probably an important part of Colson’s security arrangements.
DH: Remiel gathered blankets and towels to shield herself from the cold, then stepped out into Wyoming on a cold November night. The internees at Heart Mountain were encouraged to stay indoors at night by the bitter cold and the lack of illumination outdoors. Remiel was drawn to a greenhouse in the center of the camp, lit up like Christmas, and she stepped inside. Somehow she already knew there would be no heat inside. There was a struggling vegetable garden, but no stove, and the glass of the greenhouse only kept away the snow and wind. A heavily-garbed Japanese-American fellow was up late at night trying to keep his plants alive. He seemed quite angry at being disturbed by her intrusion. Remiel bowed deeply. “Please forgive me, sir, I came from another part of the camp but as you can see I am not dressed for the cold. I came in here by necessity.” The man’s anger faded to pity when Remiel told him she had been held prisoner at the camp since June. Not even the first wartime internees arrived until August.
DI: “Who are you?” he demanded to know. She said, “My name is Remiel Zinter. I’m from Havilah in the state next door.” In turn, out of politeness, the man gave his name as George Kaneko and this astonished Remiel to no end. She said, “My history professor told me all about you, sir.” But more astonishing was how she remembered the smallest details of Cassiel’s lecture. Kaneko said, “I’m nobody! Why are children in Havilah being taught about me?” Remiel herself didn’t know the answer to his question, but she said, “I know your parents are issei, sir. They came here from Nippon. They couldn’t become citizens, but you were born here. You’re nisei, sir. You’re every bit as American as I am, yet you and I are in this camp. You have your wife here with you, and also your three sansei daughters. My professor told us you and your family worked hard and made a good life on your strawberry farm in Washington. But after the internment was announced you were tricked into selling your land for pennies on the dollar.”
DJ: “Now we crowd into barracks with three other families and eat in a common room that serves the whole block. And all this because fear gripped the whole country after Pearl Harbor.” “Land of the free, home of the brave,” said Remiel bitterly, and remembered how, true or not, Colson bragged of making it all happen. But time was pressing. Mr. Kaneko said, “I’m very sorry, Remiel, but you cannot stay in my greenhouse. When they find you they will punish me.” “I understand completely,” she said. “You have to think of your family. But please, Mr. Kaneko, do your daughters have any clothing to spare? I will not last very long outdoors wearing just a hospital gown.” “They are too young, nothing they have would fit you. But I will give you clothes of my own. When you are captured you can tell them you stole them from my greenhouse.” “What makes you certain I will be captured, Mr. Kaneko?” “A tall fence of barbed wire began to be put up in October, much to our dismay. It is nearly complete, and well illuminated.”
DL: “You thought perfect obedience during the internment would prove your loyalty to America,” Remiel guessed. Mr. Kaneko nodded his head. “We were mistaken. What a terrible disappointment that was to us! And the guards are armed now.” “Our nativism made for us a trap,” Remiel said, gratefully pulling the coarse, heavy wool of the farmer’s coat over her shivering frame. “Then we panicked. Professor Cassiel was right, we’ll never live it down, not in a thousand years.” Mr. Kaneko remained deeply unsettled by the fact that rural schoolchildren were being taught the intimate, tragic details of his life. He said, “Even if you did get through the fence where will you go?” Remiel had the glimmer of an answer now, but no earthly answer, so she bowed to Mr. Kaneko once more, honoring the profound, quiet heroism of the incarcerated man. “I will never forget your kindness,” she told him. “And I will never forget what necessitated the kindness,” Kaneko added heavily, turning away to tend his frostbitten strawberries.
DM: Slipping back into the bitterly cold night, Remiel navigated the dark grid of the camp with precision. The single gap remaining in the newly erected perimeter fence lay along the western edge of the facility, deliberately situated well away from the train platform that delivered the internees. The open segment of the perimeter was flanked by two guard posts sweeping the snow with high-powered searchlights. Seven widely spaced but lesser-equipped towers guarded the rest of the wire. As Remy crouched in the freezing shadow of an empty barrack, the mental static of Doryphone crackled to life. Nahimana “Dory” Shybear broadcasted that she had reached the perimeter of the facility with her brother Elroy and Remiel’s own brother Samael in tow. They had crossed many miles of treacherously icy roads in her father’s wooden-sided Chrysler station wagon. “You need to wait completely out of sight until I give the word to go,” Remiel said to her young kinswoman aloud. There was no more necessity for her to subvocalize.
DN: 𝗪𝗵𝘆? Somehow Dory’s mental voice packed that single word with equal parts confusion and rising impatience. “Because a train is involved.” 𝗢𝗵, 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲, 𝗖𝘂𝘇. 𝗔 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻. Dory loved Remiel but this was serious business and Remy sounded like it was all a game to her. Dory’s sarcasm came through loud and clear. Remiel sighed and settled in to patiently explain the situation, even as the dangerous cold steadily closed in on her like a vise. She said if Dory and Elroy and Sammy drove up to the gates of the camp in a conspicuous woodie, the guards would just go out there and 𝘴𝘤𝘰𝘰𝘱. The whole rescue party would be in federal custody before anyone could blink. Crouched in the snow, Remiel spent the next half hour going over a plan that lay in her mind like a trembling house of cards that was somehow still standing. She repeated the timing until she was certain Dory knew every step by heart. At last she was satisfied. Remiel rose from her hiding place and made for the stretch of fence nearest the railroad tracks.
DO: 𝗦𝗮𝗺𝗺𝘆 𝘀𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗵𝗲 𝗸𝗲𝗲𝗽𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝗼 𝘀𝗮𝗱. Remiel said, “Tell him me too.” 𝗛𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗶𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝘆. At the time Remy had been brought to tears by the feeling her twin brother had been ripped away from her after years of being so close. Elroy had dived into a mikvah and Samael went in after him. To Remiel they were only gone for a few minutes but when they returned Sammy said it had been as many weeks. He was full of stories. And there were little things about him, signs he wasn’t the same Sammy who dove in. But Remy said, “I don’t feel that way anymore, Dory. Why is that?” She said, 𝗦𝗮𝗺𝗺𝘆 𝗴𝗼𝘁 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗯𝗶𝗴 𝗔𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗹 𝗔𝗰𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗺𝘆 𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗮 𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗱𝗶𝗱. 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀. 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗶𝘁’𝘀 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘀, 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝘂𝘀. Remiel believed her. She’d been in this place for half a year but never once left school. Intent on rejoining her brother, Remiel steered for a point as far from the looming guard towers as the geometry of the camp allowed.
DP: She was spotted by the military police almost immediately, the harsh beams of the searchlights pinning her against the snow, but none of the guards opened fire immediately. they remained confident in the absolute integrity of the fence at that location. Standing before the illuminated wire, Remiel summoned the same strange new talent that had seemed to summon the keypad combination from thin air. She could remember her own future, a time when she was quite adept at manifesting a halo. Dory saw the fence through Remy’s eyes, standing between her and freedom. Remiel said, “They cut off both of my wings, did you know that?” Dory said, 𝗪𝗲’𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺 𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗱𝗼𝗻𝘁 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝘄𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗷𝘂𝗺𝗽 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗳𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲, 𝗱𝗶𝗱𝗻’𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄? 𝗢𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄. Yes, looking just a little ahead Remiel certainly did know. And looking back, she remembered Professor Tamiel’s lecture on halos. At the time Remiel thought it was just her typically silly way of teaching certain concepts in higher mathematics.
DQ: Doctor Tamiel had said, “A fart in a room is a scalar field. A fart in a room with a fan trying to push it out a window is a vector field. A fart in a room with a fan trying to push it out a window and the fart itself is fighting back by trying to move toward safety along a side wall is a tensor field.” It was a delightfully stinky analogy. A scalar field was just a magnitude at every point. A fart was smelly, yes, but maybe more so here than over there. A vector field was magnitude, but added direction. A fan adds a push, so each bit of fart has a preferred direction. A tensor field had interactions in multiple directions, accounting for forces, pressures, and internal stresses. So the fart itself resists, the fan pushes, the walls redirect. It’s a full multi-directional dance. A halo was a bubble of space-time wherein the stress-energy tensor was altered to balance gravity. It formed a local slope down which the angel continually fell, only the slope was inverted, pointing up, away from the ground.
DR: In his lecture Dr. Ithuriel went on to say boundary effects of the displacement distorted the passage of light, appearing to an outside observer like a translucent sphere not unlike the iridescent bubble of Glinda in the film The Wizard of Oz, though devoid of its cinematic pink hue. Over the centuries, depictions of haloes in human art had followed a curious, degrading evolution akin to a game of Chinese Whispers, until the mechanical reality of the space-time bubble was reduced to the golden circlets worn by children in school plays. Gathering her strength, Remiel began a determined run and made a leap, enveloping her whole body in the shimmering distortion of the halo. She made a nearly straight ascent, gliding effortlessly over the high fence. Once she had cleared the perimeter, she allowed the halo to dissipate briefly, initiating a controlled descent toward the dark earth beyond. When she was within reach of the ground, the shimmer vanished altogether, and she landed firmly in the Wyoming snow.
DS: The guards were utterly confounded by the sight of a teenaged girl in an oversized wool coat defying the laws of gravity to vault their unbreachable fence. They responded with the only logic available to the state: they opened fire into the dark. As the first sharp cracks of the rifles echoed across the frozen plains, Remiel began to move with a fluidity that transcended human reflexes. This was a phenomenon she later christened the Dance of Life. Within her mind the immediate future was no longer a single path, but a shifting map of possibilities. Whenever Remy’s dynamic daydream encountered a blank spot she simply side-stepped into a counterfactual position, leaping to an alternative branch of the Growing Forest of Time where she remained alive. A marksman armed with an automatic weapon in a closed room might have eventually narrowed her options until no living future remained, but a sniper at a remove could never hope to strike a target who was perpetually choosing the path of her own survival.
DT: Bound by their standing orders, the guards could not abandon their posts to pursue a phantom, so they scrambled for their telephones to report the inexplicable breakout. Outside of the illuminated perimeter of the camp, Samael “Sabotage” Zinter vaulted from Jashen’s Chrysler station wagon toward a manual stand switch. This equipment diverted northbound trains from the main line onto the spur serving the Heart Mountain Relocation Center. Sammy shattered the heavy iron shaft of the reflectorized target with a single touch, rendering the metal sign incapable of indicating the true position of the switch to any approaching engineer. He then effortlessly snapped the heavy padlock guarding against tampering, and threw the iron lever to force oncoming traffic onto the dead-end siding. “Just before the next train arrives,” Sammy muttered into the freezing dark, shaking his head at the impossible, chronological precision of his sister’s plan. “The coincidences just keep on piling up, don’t they?”
DU: Barely a minute later a heavy freight train roared out of the night and veered off the main line onto the side track. The engineer instantly knew his train had been diverted onto a siding that did not merge back with the primary artery. He reacted instantly. The emergency brakes engaged with a shower of sparks. As the train shuddered to a violent halt, an open-topped gondola car slid to a complete stop directly in front of Remiel, who stood waiting in the snow. Riding behind Remy’s eyes Dory got an image of a serial number ending in 6005. The pause lasted just long enough for Remiel to haul herself over the frozen iron lip and vanish into the interior of the car. The engineer sounded a long blast of his horn and threw the heavy engines into reverse. Once the train had backed entirely onto the main line, the frustrated engineer climbed down into the snow to manually force the tapered points of the track back into their proper alignment. He climbed back aboard, and the train resumed its northbound run.
DV: Armed with Shahar Haruach, a terrible and sacred heirloom of his bloodline, Elroy sprinted alongside the accelerating mass of rolling stock to the head of the run of gondola cars. He laid the business end of the Windgate to the coupling. The steel fitting, along with its associated pneumatic cables, simply ceased to exist in this universe, cleanly severing the train in two. Unburdened of half its immense weight, the forward section of the train, including the roaring locomotive, surged ahead into the night, while the orphaned rear half of the train, bearing Remiel, began a slow, heavy deceleration along the tracks. A profound relief washed over Dory. The Prank was still in play, and the threat of imprisonment loomed over all of them, but her cousin was no longer on a one-way trip into eternity. Elroy called Remiel’s name but no head appeared over the iron lips of the cars. Sammy used handrails to scale the side of the lead car and found it packed with inch-thick slabs of steel stacked nearly to the rim.
DW: A specific gondola car emblazoned with the fading white stencil of 1C296005 rolled into Dory’s view. Climbing up and peering within, Dory saw a heart-wrenching sight: a small huddle of stolen blankets and rags pressed against the front wall, motionless in the dark. “She’s in this one!” Elroy drew near and raised Shahar Haruach to take a sweeping bite out of the solid flank of the gondola car. A perfect half-circle of rusted steel simply vanished from the side of the train, leaving a clean, gaping breach. He made a second, sweeping arc with the weapon, and a third. The artifact bit cleanly through the heavy industrial steel, effortlessly carving a wide, descending chute. Though the resulting ramp bore a slight, unavoidable hump in the center, the slide was as smooth and flawless as a polished mirror. Not so much as a single atom stood up to offer resistance. Reaching her at last, Dory saw Remy was unconscious, swaddled in the coarse wool of Mr. Kaneko’s work clothes and the pilfered linens of the clinic.
DX: Dory pushed the Remy-bundle down the frictionless steel slide, watching as the inert form plummeted directly into the waiting arms of her brother. She paused only long enough to ensure Elroy had safely secured Remiel’s freezing body within the heated interior of the woodie before throwing herself down the steel chute, landing squarely in the waiting blocky embrace of Samael. Glancing back down the dark, unbroken line of the orphaned freight cars, they could see dancing beams of heavy flashlights cutting through the snow a thousand feet away. The crewmen from the caboose were rapidly advancing up the tracks to investigate why the train had snapped in two. Dory jumped into the driver’s seat and threw the Chrysler into gear. In the back seat Elroy peeled back the garments that made his girl look for all the world like a clean-shaven hobo. Reaching pale bare skin, Elroy was struck by the deep terrifying chill of Remiel’s body. “Skin to skin,” Dory said over her shoulder, “that’s how you can pull her through.”
DY: Elroy agreed that shared, direct body warmth was the only thing that would save Remiel from her life-threatening hypothermia. It was a prescription he required no convincing to administer. He applied his own frantic, elevated body heat to that of his freezing cousin. When his hands reached the two stubs of her amputated wings it broke his heart. Still, she was alive and now there was growing hope she would stay that way. A small smile came to his face when he realized the true miracle of their escape lay not so much in Sammy’s talent for breaking things or the power of the Windgate, but in the bureaucratic machinery of the state itself. Elroy’s father Jashen was a full-time, ordained member of the clergy. The windshield of the station wagon bore a wartime ‘X’ ration sticker, granting him the same privilege to purchase gasoline as any active policeman, fireman, or high-ranking politician in Washington D.C. This singular, mundane exception to the rationing laws made the rescue mission from Havilah possible.
DZ: The route home doubled back towards the camp. When the woodie reached the illuminated perimeter of the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center they all saw armed guards swarming out of the gate on foot but fortunately no vehicles were yet evident. Samael knew that would soon change. A terrified Claude Colson would see what Sammy did to the switch and what Elroy did to the train. He would tear the clinic apart, trace Remy’s footprints in the snow, interrogate Mr. Kaneko, interview the guards and the freight train crew, and a nationwide hunt would begin. As Dory raced past the camp far in excess of the wartime speed limit of 35 miles per hour the magnetic proximity of the prison seemed to stir Remiel back into consciousness. Stirring weakly in the dark, she opened her eyes to find herself enveloped in the intense, desperate affection that Elroy was openly lavishing upon her shivering frame. Luxuriating in the expansive warmth she managed an exhausted smile. “Oh I like this afterlife,” she whispered to him.

D

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