“I think we both know what we’re talking about here,” Peter said.

Apgar, seated across the paper-stacked expanse of Peter’s desk, was looking at his nails. “I didn’t say I liked it. But the trade has the manufacturing capacity, and it’s not like we haven’t dealt with them before.”

“Dunk’s not Tifty.”

“What about Michael?”

Peter frowned. “Sore subject.”

“The guy was an OFC. He knows how to cook oil—he can do this.”

“What about this boat of his?” Peter asked.

“He’s your friend. You tell me what it’s all about.”

Peter took a long breath. “I wish I could. I haven’t seen the guy in over twenty years. On top of which, we tell the trade we’re out of ammo, we’ve tipped our hand. Dunk will be sitting in this chair in a weekend.”

“So threaten him. He comes through for us or that’s it, the deal’s off, we storm the isthmus and put him out of business.”

“Across that causeway? It’d be a bloodbath. He’ll smell a bluff before I stop talking.”

Peter leaned back in his chair. He imagined himself laying out Apgar’s terms to Dunk. What could the man do but laugh in his face?

“This is all stick. There’s no way it’s going to work. What can we offer him?”

Gunnar scowled. “What, besides money, guns, and whores? Last time I checked, Dunk had all of those in plentiful supply. Plus, the guy’s practically a folk hero. You know what happened last Sunday? Out of the blue, a five-ton full of women shows up at the encampment in Bandera where they’re housing the road crews. The driver has a note. ‘Compliments of your good friend Dunk Withers.’ On a fucking Sunday.”

“Did they send them away?”

Gunnar snorted through his nose. “No, they took them to church. What do you think?”

“Well, there has to be something.”

“You could ask him yourself.”

A joke, but not entirely. There was also Michael to consider. Despite everything, Peter liked to think that the man would at least agree to talk to him.

“Maybe I’ll do that.”

As Gunnar rose, Chase appeared in the doorway.

“What is it, Ford?” Peter asked.

“We’ve got another sinkhole. A big one. Two houses this time.”

This had been happening all spring. A rumbling in the earth; then, within moments, the ground would collapse. The largest hole had been over fifty feet wide. This place really is falling apart, Peter thought.

“Anybody hurt?” he asked.

“Not this time. Both houses were empty.”

“Well, that’s lucky.” Ford was still looking at him expectantly. “Is there something else?”

“I’m thinking we should make a statement. People are going to want to know what you’re doing about it.”

“Such as what? Telling the ground to behave itself?” When Ford said nothing, Peter sighed. “Fine, write something up, and I’ll sign it. Engineering on the case, situation in hand, et cetera.” He raised an eyebrow at Ford. “Okay?”

Apgar looked like he was about to laugh. Jesus, Peter thought, it never ends. He got to his feet.

“Come on, Gunnar. Let’s get some air.”

—

He had become president not because he desired the job particularly but as a favor to Vicky. Right after her election to a third term, she had developed a tremor in her right hand. This was followed by a series of accidents, including a fall on the capitol steps that had broken her ankle. Her handwriting, always precise, decayed to a scrawl; her speech adopted a weirdly monotonic quality, lacking all inflection; the tremors spread to her other hand, and she began to make involuntary rocking motions with her neck. Peter and Chase had managed to hide the situation by keeping her public schedule to a minimum, but halfway into her second year, it became clear that she could no longer continue. The Texas Constitution, which had superseded the Code of Modified Martial Law, allowed her to name a president pro tem.

At the time, Peter was serving as secretary of territorial affairs, a position he had taken on midway through her second term. It was one of the most visible jobs in the cabinet, and Vicky made no secret of the fact that she was grooming him for something more. Still, he had assumed that Chase would be the one to step in; the man had been with her for years. When Vicky called Peter to her office, he wholly expected a meeting to discuss the transition to Chase’s administration; what he found was a judge with a Bible. Two minutes later, he was president of the Texas Republic.

This was, he came to understand, what the woman had intended from the start: to create her successor from the ground up. Peter had stood for election two years later, won easily, and ran unopposed for his second term. Some of this was his personal popularity as a chief executive; as Vicky had predicted, his stock was very high. But it was also true that he had assumed the office at a time when it was easy to make people happy.

Kerrville itself was on its way to becoming irrelevant. How long before it was just one more provincial town? The farther out people settled, the less the idea of centralized authority held sway. The legislature had relocated to Boerne and almost never met. Financial capital had followed human capital to the townships; people were opening businesses, trading commodities at market-established prices, negotiating life on their own terms. In Fredericksburg, a group of private investors had pooled their money to open a bank, the first of its kind. There were still problems, and only the federal administration possessed the resources for major infrastructure projects: roads, dams, telegraph lines. But even this wouldn’t last indefinitely. When Peter was being honest with himself, he understood that he was not so much running the place as guiding it into port. Let Chase have his chance, he thought. Two decades in public life, with its endless closed-door bickering, was plenty for any man. Peter had never farmed; he’d never so much as planted a tomato. But he could learn, and best of all, a plow had no opinions.