The sound of no airplanes in a clear sky, the stars and satellites coming out. We drove out of town and passed people stepping out of their darkened houses onto the unlit streets. Several cars were on the road, and just before we pulled out another crowd of people was beginning to migrate down the street to the house. Holly didn’t pay them any notice, and no one stopped us. When we passed the limits of the town, I began to realize, for the first time, just how dark the night was. All the lights had been put out in an instant, as though all at once a billion eyes figured it was a good time to go to sleep.

Adela and I sat in the back seat together while Holly drove. For two hours we cruised along the highway outside of town, the headlights piercing through the dark alone. During all that time, only a few cars passed us, speeding, and overloaded with baggage pressing against the windows, boxes of food and clothes, provisions and stuff. On the edge of the forest along the highway border, a few animals tentatively snuffed the air. Two wide black eyes would appear now and then in the glare of the headlights, and then disappear back into the forest, leaving behind a misty exhalation. I had plenty of time to think, and so did that girl beside me.

As we approached the city, Adela opened the window and looked out. A cool gust of air blew through the car and, reminded of Meredith and Holly’s husband, I glanced over at the old pair of riding boots on the floor of the passenger side. There were unpleasant facts here, too. I sometimes wondered what Adela thought of them.

I held my hands over my knees and looked back and forth between the window and the rear-view mirror. Holly was focused on the road. She hadn’t spoken a word since we left the town.

Then Adela tugged at my sleeve.
“Look—” she said, and pointed out into the night. I leaned over and followed her finger with my eyes, but at first it was hard to make anything out. Then, one by one, objects were defined along the highway borders: cars, hundreds or maybe thousands of them, stacked up like toy blocks in columns five stories high. There was a twenty foot wide corridor running through the center of the woods, as though someone had decided to bulldoze through it. The huge trees were leveled in one direction. We passed by quickly.
“What happened?” 
“And look over there,” she said to me, pointing up to the sky over the narrow row of trees just past the cars.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Stars,” she said.
“So?”
“When was the last time you saw stars near the city?”
I looked over in the direction of the city. I couldn’t find it.
“The city,” I said. “Adela. It’s gone.”
“No, it’s there,” said Holly, squinting into the mirror. She seemed to find something there and turned around to face us, with her right hand gripping the passenger seat. “We’re stopping there tonight, and then driving upriver tomorrow morning.”
Adela leaned back inside the car, and rolled up the window halfway. “Mom…” she said. The thought trailed off, and she didn’t finish her sentence. The car was quiet and tense for a minute, and then Holly turned back around.

“Let’s try the radio,” she suggested, turning it on. She flipped the dial from static, 60s rock, and what sounded like a pre-recorded talk radio show, to something different. Directions and instructions were being broadcast, and Holly took out a pad of paper and started to note them down. An address, a time, and a number of other things I couldn’t make out.

Not for the first time, I felt completely out of my depth. And Adela didn’t look too comfortable either, staring out the window, fidgeting with her clothes, and nervously tapping her shoes. Holly may have been home all day, working her brains out over the one big issue—but for Adela and me, the day had been groundbreaking in a much different kind of way. As I mulled this over, resting my eyes on her shoes, she caught me staring—and smiled. 
 
One thing occurred to me during the car ride, though. And it came upon me entirely by chance. It was about Adela. I realized that a good part of the reason there are girls like Adela is that there are mothers like Holly. In some sense, maybe this sounds obvious, but I think that the reason Adela treated love in such a dismissive or mocking way was probably because of Holly, and what Holly had done to her husband. Adela saw all this, took note of it, and buried it deep inside her. Holly distrusted her husband—maybe for a good reason, but it's not my place to judge that in this account—and then molded him into her personal foot-pet. Now, at a very young age Adela might have thought to herself: If that’s what happens to my father when he loves someone else, then how would Holly punish me if I ever fell in love and tried to get away from her?

I thought that Adela’s games masked a deeper uneasiness, and also an awareness and fear of love’s real power to change and control her. And if I loved her, then I was in for a real uphill battle. Still—for the moment—I had no choice but to agree to be her slave—in the long run, I probably ran a better chance with her than with Holly. And maybe somehow, eventually, I could show her that I didn’t have to be a slave for her to like me, and that there was something really transformative and mind-blowing in the way that love can bind you to another person. Or maybe I was thinking too much, too late, and she’d already figured this out. (In some version of the story, that meeting between us in the park had actually been consensual. I wasn’t even sure.)

Adela rummaged under the seat and produced an unopened box of cookies. “Hungry?” she asked. I was (and remembered, vaguely, eating a few crumbs from her hand, that first day, so long ago). 

At that moment I felt so bold, anxious, and alive that I started talking to Holly (she was off the radio). Some combination of guilt and exhilaration got ahold of me.
“Holly,” I said. “Why don’t you let Meredith out?” Or your husband, I was going to add, but held my tongue.
“No.” She was curt, but then seemed to soften a little. “She’s happy enough where she is. You’ll see her tonight.”
“Right.” I didn’t know what to say. Holly was implacable. She would never change.
“Oh, and Martin?”
“Yes?”
“When we get there you’ll have to, uh, shrink again. I don’t know why you’re this size, and I wasn’t going to say anything to Adela—but that’s the way things are going to be.”
“Again,” I thought. But this time it was different. There was something Holly didn’t know, and there was something I was sure—as I glanced over at Adela—that we would keep a secret from her, until the right time. I would do my best.

In the darkness, we crossed a long bridge over the river into the city (a bridge where the seabirds high up in the moonlight still dipped and pivoted between the three-foot wide suspension cables), and drove slowly down the long avenues where fires blazed in steel drums, and glass display windows were shattered along the sidewalk. We passed a few hundred women walking up the street, with packs slung over their shoulders, chatting together, and walking north, toward us, as though from a place prearranged. Some were weeping, and others laughing, but all carried a tiny little cage between their fingers. Here and there, we saw a woman running in the other direction, looking scared. Holly looked back at Adela and motioned with her chin.

“Martin,” she said. “It’s time.”
“Wait.”
“Sorry, I can’t. Adela…”
“Mom, just let him say something.” Holly froze, and stared in the rear-view mirror for a few seconds.
“Well,” she finally said. “I already know the question. And here’s the answer. Adela, listen if you want to.” She sighed deeply.
“Look around at those people,” she said. “Women, all of them. And each one holding a cage.”
I looked, and it was true.
“What’s inside the cages, you’ll ask. You already know. Men: husbands, sons, brothers, relatives, and friends.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why? Because ten years ago I got online and learned that there were hundreds of other women like me, women who had the power to shrink and grow, and women who could pass that power on to their daughters. We realized that we could use our power to re-order society and civilization, to begin again, anew. And we realized that if we didn’t use our gifts for the good of humanity” (she was waxing lyrical, here) “then we’d have failed ourselves, our country, and the human species.” 
I looked out the window. It was dark and cold.
“We’re going to the Museum tonight. If you want to meet some people, you can. The city isn’t ours yet—but it almost is. We have the Capital, the Government, the Military, and we almost have the major cities. And all this, Martin (and Adela), without a single shot fired—without a single casualty!”
“It’s hard to believe,” Adela said.
“Yes,” said Holly."It is."
“What about me?” I asked.
“You? Well, not much will change for you, I’m happy to say. We’re moving upstate tomorrow—we and a few others—but you’ll still be with me.”
“A slave?”
“Yes. But think of it this way, Martin,” she said, good-naturedly. “You’ve had a head-start on the rest of them.”

So Adela shrank me, and put me in her warm pocket. In this new world, I hoped that Holly was wrong about “not much changing for me”—and I forced myself to believe that Adela hoped it too. When we left the car, I had a brief glimpse of a pale figure inside Holly’s boot, raising his hands up in either protest or supplication: and then Holly zipped him in. The other boot went on, but I couldn’t see Meredith inside. Nothing would ever change for either of them, new society or old. It was strange that Holly didn’t ask for me, but I didn’t go out of my way to remind her. She was a woman I would never be able to influence.

On the other hand, with Adela I had a real chance at finding a favorable position, or getting a reasonable deal. Adela stepped out of the car and followed her mother into the Museum. At the huge doors they met a tall woman who waved them inside. A tall fire flickered and glowed against the walls of the central lobby.

Adela showed me her watch. It was about ten minutes before midnight.