CORY DOCTOROW · 42
weren’t quite military. They came in white and brown, male and female, and smiled freely at one another as they sat down at the other end of the truck, joking and drinking coffees out of gocups. These weren’t Ay-rabs from Afghanistan: they looked like tourists from Nebraska. I stared at one, a young white woman with brown hair who barely looked older than me, kind of cute in a scary office-powersuit way. If you stare at someone long enough, they’ll eventually look back at you. She did, and her face slammed into a totally different configuration, dispassionate, even robotic. The smile vanished in an instant. “Hey,” I said. “Look, I don’t understand what’s going on here, but I really need to take a leak, you know?” She looked right through me as if she hadn’t heard. “I’m serious, if I don’t get to a can soon, I’m going to have an ugly accident. It’s going to get pretty smelly back here, you know?” She turned to her colleagues, a little huddle of three of them, and they held a low conversation I couldn’t hear over the fans from the computers. She turned back to me. “Hold it for another ten minutes, then you’ll each get a piss-call.” “I don’t think I’ve got another ten minutes in me,” I said, letting a little more urgency than I was really feeling creep into my voice. “Seriously, lady, it’s now or never.” She shook her head and looked at me like I was some kind of pathetic loser. She and her friends conferred some more, then another one came forward. He was older, in his early thirties, and pretty big across the shoulders, like he worked out. He looked like he was Chinese or Korean — even Van can’t tell the difference sometimes — but with that bearing that said American in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. He pulled his sports-coat aside to let me see the hardware strapped there: I recognized a pistol, a tazer and a can of either mace or pepper-spray before he let it fall again. “No trouble,” he said. “None,” I agreed. He touched something at his belt and the shackles behind me let go, my arms dropping suddenly behind me. It was like he was wearing Batman’s utility belt — wireless remotes for shackles! I guessed it made sense, though: you wouldn’t want to lean over