The night is an abacus of ash and wire, counting the tallies that nobody names. Far in the basalt desert of the east, the silver birds sit tethered in the dust— until the sky bends downward like a bow, and plumes of iron blossom on the runway. Wings curl into tallow; radar turns to glass. From distant lecterns, polished voices rise to measure honor against the price of crude, speaking of deterrence in low, rounded vowels while tankers rock heavy upon darkening seas, their black cargo rising, cent by cent, through the cold veins of the hemisphere. Under the marble domes where daylight thins, the ledger-men argue in carpeted vaults. They weigh the price of a citizen’s pulse against a paper voucher, five thousand stamped coins whispered like rain before an autumn ballot. Some see salvation in the minted gift; others smell ruin in the sudden grace, fearing the ledger will break at the spine while the factions divide like salt in a bowl, bargaining tomorrow for a rented reprieve. Beneath the carpet, the stylus moves quiet, scratching new borders across the white vellum. A hand invisible pares down the census, shaving the shadows from valley and borough, carving the districts so power may sleep in cradles of geometry, neat and secure. Who shall be counted when the ink turns to law? The phantom lines stretch through the avenues, deciding the harvest before seeds are sewn, turning the living to margins of drift. And far past the murmur of council and wire, where the green earth bleeds copper beneath the equator, a schoolhouse roof buckles under sudden orange teeth. No sirens, no treaties, no briefings prepared— only the bell that turns into a shriek, the door jammed with elbows, the stampede of feet, small shoes left behind in the charcoal and heat. Twenty small breaths vanish into the smoke, uncounted by censuses, untouched by dividends, unavenged by the missiles that strike in the sand. The globe spins on pivots of silence and greed. The oil drums rise. The cartographers measure. The small ghosts go running through hallways of air, while the men in the towers watch screens turn to gray, waiting to see which empire will burn, and which one will merely be sold.
