I said, “I wonder if . . . if they know now that we’re coming?”
“Not likely.”
“Not likely? Maybe but not likely? That’s the best you’ve got, Panthea?”
“The spell of repetition put on this stretch of road is an automatic deceit requiring none of their attention, no maintenance. We are perhaps the first to succeed against it.”
“Perhaps,” I echoed. “Perhaps? But if anyone before us has succeeded, then they don’t trust it entirely. They’ll be wary.” I put a hand to my chest. “I shouldn’t have eaten that sandwich when we stopped in Sells. I’ve got big-time heartburn.”
Although her own fear was evident, Bridget reached out and pinched my cheek and said, “Gonna be a piece of cake, boyfriend.”
I said, “In every movie, at a moment like this, when someone says it’s gonna be a piece of cake, it never is. That’s always when the dying starts.”
“This isn’t a movie,” she assured me, but there was an edge of fear in her voice that she could not hide. She drove onward toward Light’s Oasis.
The inhospitable terrain rose gradually until we came to a crest and found before us a bowl in the land that was maybe a mile in diameter, like a crater where a large meteor or small asteroid slammed down millennia earlier, although it might have been a normal geological formation. I know nothing about geology except what I learned about Krypton, Superman’s home planet, when I was thirteen. In Light’s Oasis, the palm trees, shrubs, and flowers were so lush that the glen in which the Republic of Beebs did business seemed barren by comparison. Evidently a major aquifer lay under the place, and they tapped it with no concern about either conservation or the laws governing water use in this parched state.
The Oasis had other features not found in the Republic of Beebs, including a forty-foot-tall wicker man, a T. rex scaled twice the size of the real dinosaur and welded together from steel plates, and an Aztec temple.
Although the settlement below appeared to be deserted, Bridget quickly backed the Mountaineer down from the rim of the crater, if indeed it was a crater, until we were out of sight of anyone below, and she switched off the engine.
“Except for the vegetation,” she said, “it seems like a version of the Burning Man gathering in Nevada—those strange constructions, those works of art if you want to call them that.”
“It’s a place of great evil,” said Panthea Ching, “insanity and fierce oppression, slavery, murder. Rape that he calls liberation.”
“If it’s all that,” I wondered, “then why does it fall to us to deal with it? Why aren’t the authorities aware of what’s going on here? Why haven’t they shut it down?”
“Indifference. Corruption. Fear of being canceled by those who control the narrative. People high in government, industry, media—they come here now and then to enjoy all things that are elsewhere forbidden.” Panthea got out of the Mountaineer and quietly closed her door.
The rest of us, including Winston, joined the seer where she stood in the ninety-degree heat, gazing toward the rim of the crater above us, toward the Oasis that remained out of sight, as though the air was rich with revelations that she seined from it in the manner of an angler scooping fish in her net. She looked otherworldly, as fragile as a fine porcelain figure yet as fierce as a heroine in a violent work of anime. The warm breeze ruffled her shaggy hair as though the Sonoran gods viewed her with affection. She seemed impervious to the heat; her face suffered no slightest sheen of perspiration, though the rest of us glistened and Winston sweated the only way he could, through dripping nose and lolling tongue.
Panthea said, “He’s very rich and once renowned. He knows how power can be used, who can be bent by it, who can be broken, who will resist and how to overcome their resistance.”
“Who is the bastard?” Sparky asked. “Don’t tell me he’s the Light. Who is he really?”
“I see . . . he once was . . . he is . . . Bodie Emmerich.”
“I’ve heard that name,” I said. “He was someone once. He was almost famous, I think.”
“I’m enough older than you to remember,” Panthea said. “In the early days of social media, Emmerich created one of the first dating sites, Heart4Heart.”
“I think it’s still the largest,” Bridget said.
“He was among the first to realize the power of online retail, founding company after company, reaping fortune after fortune when he took them public, until he was worth billions.”