Now.

Blinding, oppressive sunlight falls upon the desert, baking the sand and causing a heat-haze to rise, so that it seems the horizon wriggles and shimmies all around you. This harsh terrain you have come to is a place of solitude and silence. You hear nothing, save for the wind whipping across the tops of shallow dunes, flicking up a spray of sand as it passes. This is a brutal land. You see nothing here that lives, save for sparse clumps of hard, beige grass here and there, and hardy brown lizards that dart between them.

Heat, and glaring light, and dryness. Your new work—your new calling—has brought you to this place. And yet you have nothing to fear here. You cannot feel the heat, and the brightness of the midday sun doesn't bother you nearly so much as it once surely did. You stare up at it a few seconds, without ill effect—for you have no retinas to burn, no nerves to feel pain.

This is the Mojave Desert, sixty miles from the city limits of Las Vegas. A single road runs across the land here, passing a walled compound, the Mount Vernon Ranch. The compound was built in the 1960s as a retreat for artists, and has since passed through the hands of various entrepreneurs and B-list celebrities seeking wilderness and calm. Most recently, it was acquired by a shell company connected with the No State Separatists, a network of paramilitary groups intent on pressuring the US government to cede land and territorial independence to them, by use of violent action. That is, they are terrorists, in the literal sense of the word—well-armed, well-trained, homegrown American terrorists.

These are the people you have come to Nevada to observe.

A voice in your ear: "This is Meeks. Can you hear me okay?"

"Yes," you answer.

"Okay, I'm about half a mile to your six o'clock. We have two big vans full of big people with big guns about five hundred yards farther back. You have the green light to enter the target facility. Keep in contact—I don't like using the comm beam out at this range."

The voice is scratchy, overlaid with static hiss and swirls of feedback. Unpleasant to listen to. An unfortunate necessity—the science that allows the living to speak with those such as you is hardly precise.

"Understood," you say.

The wall that surrounds the Mount Vernon Ranch is ten feet tall, and strong—built only in the last decade, it is the most recent addition to this compound. But to you, it is no more substantial than smoke. With two steps, you pass through it and enter this home of violent thought and deed.

You have been briefed on this place. You had expected some sort of training camp or a weapons stockpile, occupied by perhaps twenty people at most. But this is no armory—this is a community. Yes, it has an open-air weapons range and a watchtower of wooden scaffolding that peeps over the wall surrounding the compound. But you also find a vegetable garden, a chapel, a small store selling candy and beer and soda. There are perhaps forty or fifty adults here, each one carrying a pistol at their hip or, in 

The wall that surrounds the Mount Vernon Ranch is ten feet tall, and strong—built only in the last decade, it is the most recent addition to this compound. But to you, it is no more substantial than smoke. With two steps, you pass through it and enter this home of violent thought and deed.

You have been briefed on this place. You had expected some sort of training camp or a weapons stockpile, occupied by perhaps twenty people at most. But this is no armory—this is a community. Yes, it has an open-air weapons range and a watchtower of wooden scaffolding that peeps over the wall surrounding the compound. But you also find a vegetable garden, a chapel, a small store selling candy and beer and soda. There are perhaps forty or fifty adults here, each one carrying a pistol at their hip or, in some cases, an assault rifle strapped across their back. But there are children here too—you count six of them, some of them playing with a large Doberman pinscher.

You pass through them all, unseen, unheard. Not even the dog pricks its ears at your silent steps.

And then that scratching, squealy electronic voice in your ear once more: "Are you inside? What can you see?"