“How many prisoners?” asks Simon, squinting south. Sweat runs into his eyes, and he wipes them with the back of his dirty hand.
“Unclear,” says Flagg. “The internet says three fifty, give or take. About half are kids. We know they keep ’em separated.”
“He missed the good old days, I guess,” says Simon. “Sheriff Roy. Kids in cages.”
He wipes the sweat from his face.
“You really think we can do this?” he asks.
“This is not your crack A team,” says Flagg. “Your ICE gestapo slipping down fast ropes. These are local boys in pickup trucks playing soldier.”
“So you can get us in?” says the Prophet.
“Definitely.”
He pulls a kid’s walkie-talkie （$29.99 for a set of four） from his pocket, talks into it.
“Cyclops, put together three action packs, full battle rattle, night-vision goggles, the works. We’re going in after midnight.”
He looks at Katniss.
“Me and one-eye will go in the front. You circle with Simon and the Prophet and cut your way in from the back.”
“Roger Wilco,” she says.
On the walk back to the van, Simon falls in next to her. Katniss is six foot one. A high school volleyball star who dropped out senior year.
“So you’re rich,” she says.
Simon’s stomach turns. He hates conversations about money. They make him feel exposed, guilty.
“Not me personally, no. There’s a credit card I can use with no limit. But mostly things just get paid for.”
“Must be nice,” says Katniss. The left half of her head has been shaved down to stubble. Under the fuzz is a tattoo of a yellow rose.
“Nice?” says Simon, as if that word in this context has never occurred to him. “It’s—confusing. Being rich is the same as thinking everything’s free. No one ever says We can’t afford that, so how am I supposed to know that boats or houses or watches cost money? Or that money is a thing that exists in finite supply? My father has so much hidden away in offshore accounts, I can’t imagine an object or an experience I could want that I couldn’t have without a second thought. That makes everything free. So you grow up defective or, like, handicapped. You look around and see everyone else is fighting, struggling, but you don’t understand why. How can they be hungry when everything is free?”
“I grew up in tract housing, washing dishes by hand after taco shell Monday,” Katniss tells him. “I found an old bike in a barn once, rode it home, singing free bike! Then the kick stand cut my foot, gave me tetanus. So, listen, nothing in this world is ever really free.”
They reach the flats by six. Simon feels dizzy from heat that seems to be mummifying him alive. Back at the campsite, Louise is lying on a flat rock by the van, sunning herself, topless.
“You ever eat astronaut ice cream?” she asks from behind oversize sunglasses. “Those foil packets full of dehydrated dairy? That’s what I feel like right now.”
She’s so thin he can count her ribs. There’s a mole under her left nipple. From a distance, it looks like another nipple.
“I don’t know about you,” she says, “but feeling like I could die of thirst out here puts all my old life shit into perspective.”
“So this is you achieving nirvana,” he says, squatting under a low cypress tree.
“No. This is me cooking out the toxins. Goodbye, clonazepam. So long, paroxetine.”
She lays her arm over her eyes. Simon sits on a rock. He doesn’t know where to put his eyes, given her nudity. He drinks from his metal water bottle, water so hot it burns his tongue.
“Hot,” he says, spilling down the front of his shirt.
“First time drinking?” she asks.
“Shut up.”
He walks over to the van, grabs a plastic water bottle from the cooler, holds it to his forehead. He drinks it all at once, the cold a painful cut in his throat. Louise is right. There is a clarity in him today that feels exaggerated. Four days without pills after how many years? Five, six? Medication for anxiety and depression, for ennui, social paralysis, fear of failure. These days when he thinks about happiness and contentment, he thinks in terms of milligrams.
Long shadows spill across the calèche, the sun balanced on the lip of the western hills. It will be dark in two hours, the temperature dropping quickly. Not for the first time, Simon wonders if there will be gunfire, if he will be killed. He has gone from liberated to fugitive in less than forty-eight hours. Flagg is kneeling by the action bags, reviewing their gear. Simon watches him pull the clips from an assault rifle, check the action.