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  Potty-Mouth grappled with him, lifting the smaller man off his feet. The frère took the beating for what seemed like a long time, merely twisting to avoid the groin and face shots that PottyMouth aimed. The trustafarians on the roof were all silent, watching, shivering.

  Finally, the frère had had enough. He broke free of PottyMouth's grip on his arms with ease, and as he dropped to the ground, smashed Potty-Mouth in both ears simultaneously. PottyMouth reeled, and the little frère aimed a series of hard, wickedfast blows at his ribs. I heard cracking.

  Potty-Mouth started to fall, but the frère caught him, picked him up over his head, then piledrivered him into the gravel. He lay unmoving there, head at an angle that suggested he wouldn't be getting up any time soon.

  The frères in the cherry pickers scrambled down. One of them slung Potty-Mouth over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carried him down the stairs. The little frère who'd killed him stepped back into the doorway, pulling the broken door shut behind him.

  "Get dressed," broadcasted a Power-Armor.

They herded us back downstairs without a word. The crowd moved with utter docility, and I could see the logic of the proceedings. Terrified, blood-sugar bottomed out, thirsty, we were completely without fight.

  On the third floor, the cubicles and desks had all been piled in a corner, making one big space. A few long tables were set up with industrial-size pots of something that steamed and smelled bland and uninspired. My mouth filled with saliva.

  "Form an orderly queue," said the sergeant from the night before, who was waiting behind one of the pots with an apron over his uniform, a ladle in his hand.

  He looked each trustafarian over carefully as they passed through the line, clutching large bowls that were efficiently filled with limp vegetables, lumpy potatoes, and a brown, greasy gravy. Each of us was issued a stale baguette and a cup of orange drink and sent away.

  We seated ourselves on the floor and ate greedily off our laps. Here in the mess, the frères relaxed and allowed the men and women to mingle.

  Friends found each other and shared long hugs, then ate in silence. I ate alone, back to a wall, and watched the others.

  Once everyone had passed through the line, the sergeant began walking through the clusters, stooping to talk and joke. He touched people's shoulders, handed out cigarettes, and was generally endearing and charming.

  He made his way over to me.

  "Monsieur Rosen."

  "Sergeant."

  He sat down beside me. "How is the food?"

  "Oh, very good," I said, without irony. "Would you like some baguette?"

  "No thank you."

  I tore off a hunk of bread and sopped up some gravy.

  "It is a shame about your friend, on the roof."

  I grunted. Potty-Mouth had been no friend of mine – and in a situation like this one, I knew, you have to be discriminate in apportioning your loyalty.

  "Ah." He stared thoughtfully at the trustafarians. "You understand, though, why it had to be?"

  "I suppose."

  "Ah?"

  "Well, once he was taken care of, the rest saw that there was no point in struggling."

  "Yes, I suppose that was part of it. The other part is that there in no place in a war for disobedience."

  War. Huh.

  The sergeant read my face. "Oh yes, Monsieur Rosen. War. We're still fighting street-to-street in the northern suburbs, and some say that the Americans are pushing for a UN 'Peacekeeping' mission. They're calling it Operation Havana. I'm afraid that your government takes a dim view of our nationalizing their stores and offices."

  "Not my government, Sergeant . . ."

  "Abalain. François Abalain. I apologize, I had forgotten that you are a Canadian. Where did you say you live?"

  "I have a flat on Rue Texas."

  "Yes, yes. Far from the fighting. You and the other
étrangers
behave as though our struggle here were nothing but an uninteresting television program. It couldn't last. You had pitched your tents on the side of a smoking volcano, and the lava has reached you."

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means that our army needs support staff: cooks, mechanics' assistants, supply clerks, janitors, office staff. Every loyal Parisian is already giving everything he can afford to the Cause. It is time that you, who have enjoyed Paris's splendor in comfort and without cost, pay for your stay."

  "Sergeant, no offense, but I have rent receipts in my filing cabinet. I pay for groceries. I am paying for my stay."

  The sergeant lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. "Some bills can't be settled with money. When you fight for the freedom of the group, the group must pay for it."

  "Freedom?"

  "Ah." He looked out at the trustafarians, who were leaning against each other, eyes downcast, utterly dejected. "In the cause of freedom, it may be necessary to abridge the personal liberties of a few individuals. But this isn't slave labor: each of you will be paid in good Communard Francs, at the going rate. It won't hurt these spoiled children to do some honest work."

  I decided that if the chance ever came, I'd kill Sergeant François Abalain.

  I swallowed my anger. "My cousin, a young girl named Sissy, she was taken last night. She was just passing through, and asked me to take her out to the club. My aunt must be crazy with worry."

  The sergeant pulled his clipboard out of his coat pocket and snapped it open. He scratched on it. "What is her last name?"

  "Black. S-I-S-S-Y B-L-A-C-K."

  He scritched more and scowled at the display. He scritched again. "Monsieur Rosen, I'm very sorry, but there is no record of any Sissy Black here. Could she have given us a false name?"

  I thought about it. I hadn't seen Sissy for ten years before she emailed me that she was coming to Paree. She'd always struck me as a very straight, sheltered kid, though I'd been forced to revise my opinion of her upwards after she gutted out that long bus ride. Still, I couldn't imagine her having the cunning to make up a name on the spot. "I don't think so. What does that mean?"

  "Probably a clerical error. You see, we're all so overworked; that is why you are here, really. I'll speak with Sergeant Dumont. She handled women's intake. I'm sure everything is fine."

Our "training" began the next morning. Like high-school gym class with heavily armed teachers – running, squats, jumping jacks. Even a rope climb. Getting us in shape was the furthest thing from their minds – this was all about dulling what little sense of initiative we might have left. I tried to stay focused on Sissy, on where she might have gone or what might have happened to her. For a few days my speculations got darker and darker until in my mind's eye I saw her being used as some sort of sex toy by the senior members of the Commune. I had no reason to believe this; the Communards were like the Victorians or the Maoists in their determination not to let sex get in the way of politics. But I was running out of even remotely acceptable possibilities. And then one afternoon I realized I hadn't thought about her at all since waking. The fatigue had fried my brain, and all I could think about was my next rest break.

  Once we'd been thoroughly pacified, they started taking us out on work gangs of ten or fifteen, clearing rubble and repainting storefronts. On a particularly lucky day, I got to spend ten hours deep in rebuilt Communard Territory, laying down epoxy cobblestones.

  We worked in a remote cul-de-sac, a power-armored frère blocking the only exit route, so motionless that I wondered if he were asleep. I worked alone, as was my habit – I had no urge to become war buddies with any of the precious tots I'd been conscripted with.

  I'd never been this deep into the rebuilt zone before. It was horrible, a mixture of Nouveau and Deco perpetrated by someone who'd no understanding of either. The Communards had turned the narrow storefronts into 1930s movie sets, painted over their laserprinted signage in fanciful, curlicued Toulouse-Lautrec script. Cleverly concealed speakers piped out distant hot jazz with convincing Victrola hiss, clinking stemware, and Gallic laughter.

  We arrived just after dawn, and within a very short time my knees were killing me. A few Parisians had trickled down the block: a baker who cranked out his awning and set baskets of baguettes in the window; a few femmes de ménage with sexy skirts, elaborate up-dos and catseye glasses clacked down the street; a gang of insouciant lads flicked their cigarette ends at us poor groveling conscriptees and swaggered on.

  I managed to keep it together until the organ grinder arrived. It was the monkey that did it. Or maybe it was the Edith Piaf cylinder he had in his hurdy-gurdy. On balance, it was the way the monkey danced to Piaf – I started chuckling, then laughing, then roaring, so hysterical that I actually flopped over on my back and writhed on the same cobblestones I'd laid down.

  The Parisians tried to ignore me, but I was making quite a spectacle of myself. Eventually, they all slunk away, looking embarrassed and resentful. I stared at the gray sky and held my belly and snorted as they departed, and then a patch of cobblestones beside me exploded, showering me with resinous shrapnel, bruising my ribs and my arm. The Power-Armor at the street's entrance lowered his PowerFist pistol and broadcasted a simple order: "Work."

  It seemed less funny after that. Edith may have regretted nothing, but I started setting new records for self-pity.

  I'm pretty sure I lost track of the time while we were trapped in that old office block. Maybe I was concussed – the frères weren't shy about slapping us around. I doubt it, though. More likely I just stopped thinking as a way to get through the days.

  Until the evening they started dividing us into groups.

  The frères said nothing as they culled people from the bloc in the mess hall. The smaller trustafarians had been clustered into two groups; no heavy labor for them, was my guess.

  Unlike the scene when we were brought in, there was almost no noise. There was no sign of Sissy, but with our heads shaved I'm not sure I'd have recognized her.

  I had just identified one group as being visually different when a pointing finger directed me into it, giving me opportunity to study its members close up.

  We were a sullen-faced bunch, and I had this sudden, chilling feeling that wasn't helped in the slightest by the frère who grinned at us as he nudged us out the door of the mess hall. He's
like a herdsman, I thought, and looking again at the faces of the trustafarians around me, I guessed that we were the group of troublemakers. We were being culled.

The next morning I began to serve the Paris Commune in earnest. Our group had been taken out of the barracks and driven in the back of an old panel van to one of the outer arrondissements. The gunfire sounded a lot louder in the street than I was used to, though, and I felt a caffeine jag of fear when we were led into a dark, abandoned shop and taken to a bivouac in the cellar. We were given new clothes: Bangladeshi belts, the webbing of a weird fiber-plastic combo; and new T-shirts, the cotton still weirdly stiff, to wear under our good Communard uniform blouses.

  In the anemic sunshine of an April morning they took us outside to put us to death.

  Oh, that's not what they told us. "You are runners," a frère said as we stood in the street. He wore the badges of a lieutenant – though he bore just a single earring – and was using a loud-hailer to be heard above the gunfire that snapped like angry dogs at the buildings nearby. "We are still in the process of clearing the Blancs from this arrondissement," he continued. "It is a buildingby-building job, and our ammunition consumption is high. We can't spare fighters to carry rounds to our positions, so that's what you will do. Follow me, monsieurs."

  He took a step toward the corner. I started moving after him. I couldn't see any point in sticking around to be shot by one of the sour-faced guards.

  At the end of the next block, a group of frères crouched behind a wrecked Citroën. Gunfire echoed from somewhere behind the building across the street from them. Our lieutenant reached the group behind the wreckage, and exchanged words.

  "Here," the corporal said, throwing a hemp bag at me. I caught it, and had to stifle some very military language – the thing weighed a ton. It clattered like a cheap toy, which made sense when I looked inside and saw that the bag was filled with plastic magazines.

  "Not him," our lieutenant said. He pointed to the last of the stragglers approaching the Citroën. "My friend, it's time to do your part." He gestured at me; I shrugged and tossed the bag to the laggard, a scrawny trustafarian whose cheeks still bore the remnants of semipermanent tattoos. He dropped the bag and didn't bother to restrain his opinion of its weight. "Pick it up," our lieutenant said. "Your life may depend on how well you carry that.

  "We have a fire team in that building across the street. You will take this bag to them, and ask them if they've heard anything from the teams farther up the block. The damned Blancs are jamming our communications again." I looked along the line our lieutenant's finger had traced. It didn't seem that far to me. A couple of weeks ago, I wouldn't have thought twice about strolling across the street, even in the face of Parisian traffic.

  The kid picked his way through the rubble to the edge of the farthest building on our side of the street. He peered across, reminding me of an old man I used to see on the Rue Texas from time to time, who took forever to work up the courage to brave the traffic on my narrow street. Dust had made the kid's face the same gray as the old man's. I guess I should have felt sick myself, but I don't remember feeling anything.

  I saw movement across and up the street – that would be the fire team, calling its runner forward. The kid looked back at us, and I was impressed at how widely his eyes were open, and how white they looked. Our lieutenant casually waved the kid forward – though the gun in the lieutenant's hand lent a lot of weight to the gesture. The kid began to run.