“Okay,” he said, when he rolled back, with his supplicating eyes, “I’m sorry, sweetie. Just, please, Annika — keep it down with that kind of talk.”

She shrugged, but the fact that he had backed down was already making her soften towards him. She was trying to keep her head together, but it was separating out into wisps and strands and scattering all over the room. The locksmiths were talking about the attack in their slow drawls, outside the door that led to the workshop in the basement. Annika thought again of her parents, in Virginia, not so far away from D.C. at all, and of Brandy and Leo and the children. Maybe they were all going to die. Before the end of the day everyone in the country would be dead, or most of them, and which would she be?

Annika realized with a start that today she might walk home in a rubbled war zone. Trapped people in the wreckage, cars and buses smashed into each other, houses fallen in on themselves and in flames, the streets buckled. Some people would go mad with terror, while others would take advantage of it: cart televisions, bags of money from the banks, jewelry from the jewelry stores, down the street to ruined houses, while more planes dropped out of the sky. There would be gangs, warlords, something!

In the face of what she imagined, Annika thought for the first time that day that she was going to be brave.

It was the first, if not good feeling she had had for hours, the first one that did not make her nauseated to think it — and so she held onto it for dear life. The longer she considered it, the more comfort it gave her. As long as she was brave and generous and good, this thing could get as dreadful as it could get, but even if she were killed, it would not be the undoing of her.

In the face of what she imagined, Annika thought for the first time that day that she was going to be brave.

She had never been faced with anything like it. But she would make something of it. When she walked outside today into the gunfire and the blasting, and the blasting heat, she was going to transform.

She turned to Luis, touched his fleshy arm, firmly and protectively — her testy indignation, flaring only moments before, had all melted away — and said, with a new shrewdness, “Luis, when the government figures it out, they’re going to come after you. Everyone like you. I’ll take you to Canada,” she went on in her new sure voice. “I used to go up there and cross the border all the time when I was in high school. The guards knew us. They’ll let us across easy. Do you see what I mean?”

At first Luis seemed anxious again, and Annika thought he was going to reprimand her. Then, for the first time since he had come to her cubicle, he looked at her as if she had said something worthwhile. He leaned forward, his hands gripping the arms of his chair, his eyes glittering. “Annika, I think so, too,” he said. “I think they’re going to start rounding people up right away.” Annika nodded, and it was all she could do to contain her sudden strange pleasure, intensified by the thrill of hearing him say her name, and not smile. She shifted her gaze to a small black mole on his neck. When he patted her hand and left, the gesture didn’t strike her as worrisome or even patronizing, as it would have only two minutes ago.

The grackles didn’t care about anything, and were back on the window again, stabbing at the corn and stabbing each other to get at it. Annika watched Luis walk away, then pressed her fingers to her temples. She gave a key to someone from Civil Engineering and another to a young man from Theater and Dance. He needed access to a studio with a long mirror and a barre. He was trying to get out of Texas and to New York like everyone else in the world, but now the place smelled of burning metal and skin.