The Wheatgrass shots came first, with wedges of orange, grapefruit and lime arranged artfully on a big plate.

"So green," said Chaga's girlfriend, Anthea, who was new to wheatgrass.

Angie liked the look of the presentation, old fashioned shot glasses, brimming with the opaque, glossy green liquid, with just a little foam on top.

"It's like two helpings of spinach, in one little shot," said Rory.

"But what's it taste like?" Anthea had a look of mild distaste on her pretty, afro features.

"Like your lawn," said Chaga with a chuckle. "That's why they give you the oranges and stuff."

Anthea wrinkled her nose. "He's kidding, right?"

"It's herbal," said Angie, "but there's usually sweetness in there. It's like natural pro-biotics, yeah?"

That did it. Anthea was seeing a new herbalist and that was one of her keys, getting pro-biotics into every meal.

"Okay, okay." She chugged her shot, grimaced and grabbed an orange wedge.

"Not so bad," said Rory with a grin as he sipped his.

"Whooo, is that what it tastes like for, you know, cows?"

Chaga laughed out loud. "Guess we'll have to ask them."

Anthea laughed too. Angie grinned. She felt Rory's hand rest on her thigh for a moment. She let her foot rest atop his. The evening was going very well. This restaurant, Green Plates, on Fair Street in the uptown section of Kingston was two years old, they said, and doing well. The place was all wood and smoked glass, with smart-flooring that looked ancient, but was very new and had a way of muffling sound. The people at the tables around them were obviously prosperous, obviously commuters to Manhattan, obviously very up to date when it came to dining out.

The wine waiter was back, he showed the bottle to Rory and Chaga, Angie got a glimpse of the label.

"Green Thumb?"

"Yeah," Rory nodded. The cork emerged with a soft pop. "Let her taste," Rory pushed Angie's glass over.

This was legendary chardonnay, from the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Angie sniffed, got a big scent of honey, vanilla, pears, apples and flowers.

"Wow. That is impressive."

"Isn't it," said Chaga. "Real gangster type wine."

Rory shushed him.

"Okay, okay, so big time lawyers, wall street guys, billionaires...."

"It's just a bottle of wine," protested Rory. "Not really that expensive, not like champagne."

"True," murmured Chaga, sipping from the huge, ballon style wineglass.

Angie knew perfectly well that Green Thumb Chardonnay was one of the most expensive white wines in the world. Rory was just being Rory.

"So," Anthea broke in. "You never did finish telling me how you guys met up."

"Oh, well, "Angie spun her wheels, not interested at all in filling in the details on that little story. Anthea was a sweet kid, but they weren't at a place where Angie Bricken was going to tell anyone who she was, what she did and leave them wondering why.

Rory took up the slack, thankfully. He was a quick study that boy.

"She was stranded, right? So she stayed over at our place."

Angie nodded in confirmation, wanting to move things on to something safer.

"Stranded out at your place?" Anthea had been to the Callan fortress, it turned out, on a trip with Chaga.

"The truck got its directions all scrambled, " Angie said with an airy gesture.

Anthea was an inhabitant of Chaga's world, so she knew that manners didn't allow for pressing too hard on the vagaries of people's lives. The question she really wanted to ask was "truck? You drive a truck?" This white lady, of completely uncertain age, Anthea thought she had to be as much as forty, looked vastly more likely to be riding in a limo than a truck. Anthea detected a little surgery, but not much, and a lot of expensive skin care. But, manners were important. Maybe she'd find out more later on.

"Wow," she murmured, "scrambled is right. That place of yours is so far back in the woods not even the bears can find it."

Chaga guffawed. "Girl, you are on it now."

Their server was back, a slim blonde with an impressive bod, obviously so, despite the boxy cut work shirt and black apron she wore.

Anthea and Rory both had rack of lamb. Chaga had the braised, free range pork, and Angie had carnebiotics, which came served with brown rice and some brilliantly green broccoli.

"Now what is that, again?" said Chaga, pointing with his fork at her plate.

"Carnebiotics. It's designed for optimal human digestion."

"Designed? That's a theme around here."

Rory grinned at the dig. "Nothing to do with me, man. I just do vegetables."

"Seriously, now," Chaga wiped his eyes, studied her plate again. "What's it taste like?"

"Just like beef, really. They start with modified bacteria, and the end product is a mix of proteins and fats, but just none of the dangerous animal fats."

Anthea was clearly interested, but torn. "I just can't give up meat, especially chicken."

Angie shrugged. "Real meat, at least if it's healthy, is expensive, right? Carnebiotics are cheap. Most people are eating them, they just don't know it."

"What?" Chaga feigned outrage a few degrees north of what he really felt. "You mean McDs and everyone are serving up modified bacteria instead of the real deal?"

"Of course they are, or they'd be charging ten times what they do."

Angie shovelled a taste of her food onto a side plate and passed it to Chaga. "Here, try it."

He did. "Tastes like meat. Steak."

"Yeah, but it's entirely made of bacteria, really low on the foodchain."

"So no build up of the bad stuff," said Anthea.

"Right. Plus, they tweak the fats for optimal human digestion."

Anthea studied Angie's face for a moment. Every now and then she caught something there. The smooth skin, the wide eyes, the perfect lips fractured for a moment and someone much older was revealed, really older. It didn't happen often, and you had to be looking for it, but it was there.

Mysterious, she thought. What did Rory know about this woman? He'd been really vague about her when she'd been alone with him at Chaga's place for a few minutes. Said she was a "therapist" and worked with special cases. What the hell did that mean?

Red wine was poured. Rory had chosen another super west-coaster, "High Vine Ranch," a petite sirah from the Napa Valley.

"You ever think about moving out there?" said Chaga after they'd all tried the wine.

"I did it," said Rory. "But I felt that pull on the heartstrings. Had to come home."

"Back to the backwoods you know so well?"

Rory grinned. "You bet. Don't you wish you could do the same?"

Chaga shrugged. "Never lived anywhere very long. Dad was from Jamaica. I started out in DC before it flooded. My moms disappeared there when I was twelve. We never found out what happened to her."

Angie blinked. When she'd lived there, the talk about the flooding of southern DC was all about a pending crisis. She hadn't realized that it had actually occurred.

Rory was nodding in sympathy. "You had to step up, I guess."

Chaga sighed. "Hard years. Not everyone made it. Came up here, found a niche."

"Took over, more like," Rory had the grin back.

Chaga let his upper lip slide over his lower to acknowledge the truth of that.

"Something like that. It's a dog-eat-dog world. We all know that."
"How about you?" Anthea had turned to Angie.
"California?"
"Yeah. I hear it's a lot better out there. Well in some places."
"I guess." Angie hesitated. She didn't want to talk about LA. But she didn't want to come off as too obviously trying to avoid the past. This black girl was smart, Angie could tell that Anthea was trying to put the white lady's picture together. A lot of things wouldn't quite fit, so the girl had questions. Lots of questions. That was to be expected, but Angie didn't intend to provide too many answers. "I lived there for a while. There are things about it that I loved. Problem is, it's just so dangerous. Street crime all the time, too many guns. I left when a friend got shot." She saw Anthea's eyebrows bob up and down. Another item filed away on the file in that pretty little head. "Of course the weather's wonderful." Angie smiled. "I wasn't exactly into the beach or anything, but it is a desert, so you do get used to endless sunshine. Of course, you have to take really good care of your skin."
"Yes, of course," Anthea was studying her again. Angie let herself relax. Age became more visible when you were tense.

"LA is just too much, man," Chaga was agreeing with Angie on that. "I couldn't live there. Guys going off on you for nothing the whole time. Full of crazy people."
"I guess," said Rory. "I was up in the woods, up north, you know?"
"Where the green things are?" said Chaga with his big smile. The smile was infectious, and Rory actually laughed.
"So, where do you live now?" Anthea was still pressing Angie, guessing Manhattan, of course.
"Oh, up on the ridgeline, about twenty five miles south of here. There's a few of us up there, pioneers or something like that." Angie took a sip of wine.
That had surprised the younger woman. Angie knew she must have been thinking New York City.
"People used to live up there," said Chaga. "I think there were summer colonies, people came up from the city."
"Yeah, and that's how I started coming too. You know, the city gets oppressive after a while. Not for everyone, but I like the country, the big outdoors."
Anthea had an eyebrow cocked, not really seeing Angie as an outdoorsy sort of lady. More readjusting of the data was underway. Limousine Lady who put on hiking boots. Interesting. But Chaga was off in another direction.
"That ridge has another reputation, you know that, right?"
"Sorry?"
"During the emergency, right? They had a camp up there, a torture facility. Though I've heard some pretty wild stories about it."
"There's always plenty of those." Rory was back to his habitual scepticism.
"Like what?" Anthea hadn't heard these stories and she was enjoying herself. The limousine lady lived near a former torture camp? Wow. More data.

"Well, most of it's completely crazy." Chaga shook an elegant hand as if to dust off craziness from the table beside him. "But I know this old timer, did some work for me, he says he was here all through the bad times, okay? He says they took a lot of people, high ups, wealthy types from the city there and tortured them and then shot them."
Rory sipped his wine. "Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised."
"But that was just the beginning. Later they set up some kind of special camp there. Very secret, shot anyone who came close. There's still wire and stuff there today."
Angie found herself nodding. There was. She'd seen it herself quite recently.
"So what did they do there?"
"That's the crazy thing. According to old Rashid? They had thousands of women there, just women. All races, all kept underground somewhere. It was all behind the wire, see. They shaved their heads. He saw that, because now and then they let some of them come up for the sun, or something. Lots of them. Thousands, he said."
"Women?" Rory was interested now.
"Yeah and here's the thing, they kept them pregnant. They wanted babies."
"Babies?"
Chaga spread his hands. "I know, sounds weird, but those were really strange times."
Angie felt a chill go down her spine. Thousands of pregnant women imprisoned up there, but why?

"How did, he, uh, find out about this?" Rory wasn't back to his usual self yet. The vision just laid out had been a little too unsettling.
"Rashid was a hunter. Yeah, I know, unusual that, black kid with a thing for hunting deer, but it was a way to bring in some food. Those were hard times for a lot of people. So he spent a lot of time up there, and over in the Catskills too. Anyway, he said, it was common knowledge among the hunters that there were lots of deer around that place, because they had snipers in there who killed anyone who came close enough to shoot a deer."
"Yikes. Hunters getting hunted." Anthea asked for more wine. Angie wondered briefly if Anthea was deliberately avoiding the real point.
Rory poured, shaking his head. "Okay, I've heard things like that too. But not about women with shaved heads and everything."
"Rashid was apparently good enough, or desperate enough to risk it. He said he made a silencer for his rifle, and would hunt up on the western side at dusk, that makes it harder for them to see you. As long as you don't stick out and offer a silhouette. Way he told it that was also the time they'd bring some of these women outside. God knows why."
"Home made silencer for a rifle. I mean, like a .306?"
"Something like that."
"You know that wouldn't work too well."
"Oh, I think it can, if you do it right. Old Rashid was an auto mechanic, had a shop of sorts at home. At least that's the way he tells it."
"And they were pregnant?" said Angie, who didn't care about the silencer business, just being completely taken by the image of imprisoned women, pregnant, kept underground up there behind the wire fence.
"Yeah, really advanced pregnancy, and their heads were all shaved. Weird, huh?"

Angie shivered. She recalled the signs with their harsh message. What had gone down in there? On the other side of the wire. Who had those women been? Why were they kept there? To make babies? "Why would they want thousands of babies?" she said. The others looked at her and shook their heads. Angie stared back at them feeling as if some colossal tombstone had just fallen off a cliff, was turning over and over in midair and was coming down to smash the world to smithereens.