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She cleared her throat and pulled out her phone again. Emails were piling up in her inbox but she ignored that. Anything she needed to know tonight would not come via email. Instead, she pulled up the menu for the Thai place near her walk-up. She was hungry now and interested in more than a pre-made sandwich from the bodega. In the time it took her to place an order, the train passed another station and finally pulled into the last stop of the line. There were no passengers waiting to get on and the platform was empty. The lights blinked. The android stood up and swung the bag over his shoulder. She smiled in case he glanced at her. He did not.

"Have a good one," she said, not quite sure why. Perhaps angry that he ignored her.

The door slid shut on his back. She watched him walk down the platform, his pace deliberate and his stance perfectly straight. She was surprised she had overlooked him when she first got on the train.

She was alone now. The pregnant woman had also gotten off at the last stop. The car lurched, then sat still. She sighed, more loudly now, and sank down further into her seat. The train lurched again and began to speed up, back toward her stop.

Her phone rang. She looked down at it in surprise. The noise was loud in the silence of the car. Her thumb hovered over the screen. The number was blocked.

"Hello?" There was no immediate answer. She glanced at her screen to see if the call was active. "Hello?"

And the hairs on her neck stood up just before he answered. As if she could feel him breathing by her ear. As if she knew it would be him before he spoke. Maybe it was something in the confidence of that pause. He knew she would not hang up without hearing what he had to say. She hoped her voice wouldn't betray her.

"How are you doing, Adrian?" Eli's voice was rougher than she expected, as if he was getting over a cold. Or perhaps it was just the years since they had last talked. "You seem good. Judging by the press conference this afternoon. Still at large, I think your words were."

She couldn't tell what he knew, not from that alone, so she didn't answer right away. She waited, collected herself. If she was lucky, and if they needed it, her surveillance team would be able to pinpoint where he was calling from later. But it certainly wouldn't dispel the rumors around her childhood, about her connection with the militia leader.

"What do you want, Eli?" she asked finally.

SEPTEMBER 2060

As of 0845 today, Eli Whitaker is still at large."

Adrian glanced out over the small crowd of reporters and the semi- intelligent drones sent from the bigger media outlets. They had promised her, when she agreed to serve as acting director, that the position would be temporary. Yet she had stood up here and made this admission, as if going to confession, every week for at least four months. The reporters did not even make a note of the fact anymore. The drones blinked red, recording.

"But I am working closely with our field office in the Appalachian Region, with the Louisville Field Division, to do regular sweeps and to act on any intel we receive. Raids over the last two months have disrupted cells of the insurgent Civil Union Militia in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. We are making progress."

She paused and glanced down at her notes. Security guards shifted at the exits and her assistant Peter, at the back of the room, was mouthing the next words in the notes they had prepared together. She breathed out.

"As we have stated before, we estimate that the Civil Union has between fifty thousand and seventy-five thousand official members." She would not call them soldiers. "There are certainly pockets of community support that we do not include in these numbers. And the children that have been pressed into the militia."

The reporters, almost simultaneously, straightened. The room was warm. The AC shut off for a half hour every two as part of its conservation cycle, and the humidity was building up in the room.

"Two months ago, I had the sad duty to report to you the death of one of these children during a raid on a compound in Kentucky."

The drones clicked and buzzed. She tried to ignore them and the memories of the Russo-Iran front they conjured up. She shifted her weight onto her left leg and reminded herself that it was not real, the whistling sound of the missile on the horizon that would decimate her bivouac.

"In that raid, we took into custody eighteen children, ages ranging between seven and sixteen. Most of these children did not have homes to which we could return them. No guardians. They are severely traumatized and need to be deprogrammed. It has not been easy to determine how best to reintegrate them into general society."

The video of the raid replayed in her head, overlapping with her own combat history, a tympanic symphony of gunshots. She gripped the podium and tried to keep her face neutral, professional. She skimmed the notes to find her place, hoping the hesitation was not noticeable.