Page 86 of Exit Party

“The case is proceeding very well,” I said. “We’re working on establishing the supply chain for the materials used in the forgery, the specialized paper and such.”

Latika nodded. Her gaze darted to her phone.

“I think there must have been help on the inside,” I said.

She frowned. “The inside of what?”

“Inside the apparatus of the State.”

Her pleasant expression faltered. There was a question in her eyes when she looked at me. I nodded, very slowly and deliberately.

“Yes,” Latika said.

Without sound, I mouthed one word to her: Service. She looked away. In the silence I heard the muffled sounds of the salon outside, voices and music.

“Service,” she said woodenly. “There was someone in Service.” Latika met my eyes, and I saw pure pain. None of us want this, I wished I could say to her, but of course that wasn’t something that could be said.

I wrote a name on a piece of paper, and slid it across the table. “I’m going to need a name,” I said. “I know you’ve been protecting someone. Think of your children. Your business. Your future as a citizen of this State.”

Latika looked at the paper. Her gaze softened then, and settled on some distant point, beyond the room. She was dissociating, leaving the scene without rising from her chair. She was somewhere else. I’d seen it in a thousand interrogations.

“David Grissom,” she said.

“Thank you. We’ll speak again soon.” I returned her phone, took the Faraday bag and the slip of paper with David’s name on it, and walked out of the salon. Trying to ignore the glances of customers in the mirrors as I passed. I couldn’t look at myself.

I didn’t return immediately to the office. Instead I boarded an eastbound train, and set out for a desert station.

10

Thirty years later, I sat alone in my office in the dark, waiting for my friend Kareem to die. It was the middle of the night, two or three in the morning. I’d been transferring files from the network onto my phone, which I knew would raise no alarms for several hours.

My phone buzzed softly in my hand. A text from Samir Li: Who is the other Kareem Fayed? I stared at the message for only a heartbeat before I replied: A ghost.

He slipped away quietly a few hours later, with his daughter by his side. Kareem, Kareem, my best and only friend. I sat very still in my office for a while when the message came in from his doctor, staring out the window, before I did what needed to be done. A half-hour later, in the first light of morning, I walked out of Service headquarters for the last time.

I’d imagined this moment for so long, and I’d expected something like quiet jubilation, but all I felt was exhaustion.

“A harmonious society comes at a price,” an instructor—Alberto?—had said to me once, in a lecture at the Service Academy, in another life, “and we are not just the ones who exact that price, we are the ones who pay it.”

At the time, I hadn’t fully understood. But now I was seventy-nine years old, Alberto was dead, and for a long time now, decades, I had lived with the understanding that I had devoted my life to the wrong thing. The regret was so fathomless that I marvelled at its scale. I felt more wonder than grief.

It was early morning, and the street was coming to life with the commute. The trains were gliding down Sepulveda Boulevard, a constant background hum. I joined a crowd streaming into a popular café, but walked through that building without stopping, through the kitchen area—the staffers glanced at me, but I moved with a confidence that suggested a high rank in the State bureaucracy, and they were afraid to speak up—and out the back door into the alley. As I stepped outside, I put on the broken glasses that I’d been carrying with me for some weeks, in preparation for this moment. I touched the strips of silver tape holding the glasses together as I walked.

I went to the beach. I couldn’t take public transportation with the glasses on my face—impossible to ride Los Angeles transit without facial recognition—and I wanted to be close to the ocean again, because I expected to be imprisoned soon. I stayed on the boardwalk for a while, walking north, and then when the boardwalk ended I took off my shoes and walked out onto the sand. A cool breeze came off the ocean.

I was close to the fence that separated the burn zone from the inhabited city. It extended inland for miles, but it didn’t go out to sea very far. The biohazard signs on the fence had been there for a long time, decades, and I hesitated for just a moment—force of habit—before I threw my shoes over the top, one at a time. They lay like black sand creatures on the other side. The tide was out, which meant that the fence ended where the water was only just over my head. I swam and moved hand-over-hand around it, retraced my route on the other side. I retrieved my shoes and walked barefoot for a while, until the sand was streaked with black and I no longer wanted that sand to touch my feet.

On this side of the fence there was a sense of desolation. There was a time when soldiers had been stationed here, but at some point over the past few years they’d withdrawn without fanfare. Within minutes the sound of the city faded to almost nothing, a minimal hum. I heard only the ocean waves and the seagulls. A surveillance drone descended, and hovered at eye level. I paid it no attention. The glasses would turn my face into a blur of white light.

There was debris on the beach now, burnt objects, sometimes recognizable and sometimes not. I stumbled over something in the sand, a hard shape, and realized I was walking on the roof of a buried car. After the Palisades burned for the third time, people had been prohibited from returning to the neighbourhood. The debris on the beach was from the first and second fires. Ahead, weeds grew from a line of hills that I knew to be the debris of the 2025 fire, remains of houses dumped on the shore. At the third such hill, I turned inland.

There was a path here. I made my way up to a wide street that in a previous version of the world had been a coastal highway. There were still burnt cars, abandoned in the last evacuation as flames swept down from the hills. On the other side of the highway, the shantytown began. It had expanded considerably since I’d last been here, and now, as always, I was struck by the scale of the shadow city. People were cooking on fires in front of small lean-tos. I saw a new system of umbrellas rigged up between trees, beneath which children sat in rows in an outdoor school.

I continued onward to a place where netting had been strung over the road, around and over several makeshift structures. The netting had been painstakingly filled in with leaves, scraps of plastic, and fabric, so that the sunlight filtered through in pinpoints but drones wouldn’t be able to see in. I passed under it, through net curtains, into a shaded stretch of road. An elderly man—my own age, which was an unpleasant thing to contemplate—sat in a lawn chair, sewing something. When I got closer, I saw he was repairing a shirt.

“Fayed,” I said.

He looked up. He looked rougher now than he had the last time I’d seen him. He had a bruise on his forehead and his hair was greasy. He gestured to the empty lawn chair beside him and I sank into it, grateful.