I

1

Dallas, Texas

Whenever Cyrus Mattingly sees an automated ticket machine, he thinks of closed factories and good men thrown out of work, of winds whistling through the shuttered prairie towns of his youth, and he feels a combination of rage and despair so acute he usually ends up clenching his fists until the nubs of his filed fingernails make white indentations in his palms. He’s never considered himself a political man. His life affords him freedom from politics, along with many other things. But there’s no denying that the automation of the world around him and his country’s complete disregard for the places where he grew up go hand in hand. Throwing good men out of work circuit by circuit and swipe by swipe.

He avoids swiping now. It’s one of Mother’s many rules.

Cash only. Nothing traceable in the days leading up to a snatch. That includes his ticket to the 7:15 p.m. showing of Sister Trip.

Another rule: wear clothes that hide the bulk of your figure. Nothing so ridiculous as a trench coat and sunglasses. More like light waffle-print coats and baggy hooded sweaters, even when it’s a touch too warm out to justify the outfit. The whole world’s got cameras now, she constantly reminds them, and your figure can give away as much about you as your face. And she’s right. Cameras and automated ticket machines and those QR code things you can read on your phones. It’s like humans are trying to get rid of everything that requires effort. And that’s a shame. He’s found great peace in his efforts. But he didn’t find it alone.

Dressed in a button-front leather coat and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap, Cyrus walks through the entrance to the AMC NorthPark Center, leaving the cheerful buzz of the shopping mall behind him. The crowd’s thick, but it’s not quite what he’d hoped. The movie business is also changing. He’d read an article just the other day that said the type of film he’d been using for years now, the “chick flick,” they called it, was showing up in theaters less and less. These online companies, the streamers, they called them, were making them so women could just sit at home on their sofas and watch one right after the other. No driving to the theater, no parking. No running into a man like him.

That was all well and good, he guessed, but it made it all that much harder for him to find new seedlings.

Used to be he could hit a multiplex on any given weekend and there’d be at least three or four to choose from. Movies about wedding planners who finally find love. Movies about sisters finding ways to get along that also snag them new boyfriends. Movies where the majority of the audience was women, most of them alone, some in the company of reluctant husbands and boyfriends and, more recently, homo friends, who seemed just as interested in the movie as they were.

But for the past three weeks there’s been only one film in wide release that fits the bill. He’d call it meaningless, but it’s so packed full of twisted, damaging messages about what it means to be a woman, he can’t dismiss it so easily. It’s called Sister Trip. The plot concerns three sisters who go on a road trip together. At every stop along the way, their inappropriate loudmouth behavior is rewarded with either new friends or degrading sex they pretend to enjoy. In the end, they finally make it to the lookout point where they’re supposed to throw their grandmother’s ashes off a cliff, but not before disrespecting almost every man they come across and pretty much disrupting the natural order of things everywhere they go.

He’d much rather see a film in which all three sisters came across a man like him out in the dark, a man confident enough to break their spines. But while plenty of women attend those kinds of films, plenty of men do, too, so that’s a no go.

A small popcorn and a soda, which he pays for in cash. Then he keeps his head down as he makes his way through the thicket of moviegoers in between him and his theater. It’s like the crowd’s moving in four different directions. Another second or two and he realizes that’s exactly the case; they’re all staring at their phones as they walk, most of them completely unaware of where they’re headed.

When he arrives at the red velour seat he picked out when he bought the ticket, he sees it’s a nice-enough-size crowd inside the screening room. Better yet, it’s mostly female, and not too many in groups.

It’s a stadium-style theater, with a few rows of seats at floor level and a raked seating area behind. He’s second row, close to the center. Not as close as he’d like to be, but that’s a casualty of paying cash and not being able to reserve the seat in advance with a credit card.

He tries not to eavesdrop on the chatter all around him. He doesn’t want his judgment of anything he overhears to bias his selection.

By now he’s familiar with the chain of trailers that precede the film—a superhero saves the world from blowing up, long-dead kings and queens in some foreign country have stupid fights in expensive costumes, something with aliens but he’s not really sure because it’s really just a teaser, but in that one it looks like the world actually does blow up.

So many damn people in Hollywood want to blow up the world.

Frustrated souls they are. They need a way to channel and focus all that rage so they can survive in the world without twisting it to their own ways. The world has enough dark corridors for men like him to slip into and feed their impulses before returning to daylit roadways, focused and purged. You just need someone like Mother to show you the way.

Once the lights inside the theater go completely dark and the studio’s familiar logo fills the screen, Cyrus takes out his phone, turns up the brightness all the way, and begins swiping through a random assortment of web pages on his phone. Right away he feels the ripple of tension go through the women on all sides of him, and it sets off a warm churning in his gut. They shift in their seats; a few of them mutter curses under their breath.

He’s willing to bet all of them are debating whether to say something to him about his rudeness.

And that’s good.

Because the one who does won’t have much longer to live.

2

Lebanon, Kansas

Lightning strikes so close to the end of the airstrip, Cole Graydon’s security director makes a sound like he’s been kneed in the gut.

The blinking wing lights of the Gulfstream they watched descend out of the stormy sky have vanished, Cole’s sure of it. Heart hammering, he waits for a plume of orange on the horizon, proof that he was wrong to ignore his security director’s earlier warnings.

Look, I know Noah Turlington could use several pieces of humble pie, but think twice before you send him hurtling headfirst through a tornado.

Cole had pretended to indulge Scott Durham’s concerns by leaving the decision whether to land in the hands of the Gulfstream’s pilot. But secretly he’d been savoring the image of Noah—beautiful, strong, brilliant, ice-water-in-his-veins Noah, the man who’s caused him so much grief for so many years—gripping armrests while trying not to hurl.

There’ve been several breaks in the rain since Cole and Scott stepped from the Suburban and took shelter under the overhang next to the airstrip. The wind, however, hasn’t let up once. Every now and then it drives residual droplets from the overhang’s roof into their faces with stinging force.

Cole spots the plane again, wings canted, fighting crosswinds.