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  ‘Our wives,’ Gantro said, ‘will let us go.’ But he knew better.

  He looked back at the Facility manager, Mr Sam B. Carpenter, and at the truck driver, Ferris, who, Carpenter had told the press and TV, was as of this date fired and was a new and inexperienced employee anyhow.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘They won’t let us go. None of them will.’

  Clumsily, Ian Best fiddled with the complex mechanism that controlled the funky coal-burning engine. ‘Sure they’ll let us go; look, they’re just standing there. What can they do, after what you said on TV and what that one reporter wrote up for a feature story?’

  ‘I don’t mean them,’ Gantro said tonelessly.

  ‘We could just run.’

  ‘We are caught,’ Gantro said. ‘Caught and can’t get out. You ask Cynthia, though. It’s worth a try.’

  ‘We’ll never see Vancouver Island and the great oceangoing ferries steaming in and out of the fog, will we?’ Ian Best said.

  ‘Sure we will, eventually.’ But he knew it was a lie, an absolute lie, just like you know sometimes when you say something that for no rational reason you know is absolutely true.

  They drove from the lot, out onto the public street.

  ‘It feels good,’ Ian Best said, ‘to be free … right?’ The three boys nodded, but Ed Gantro said nothing. Free, he thought. Free to go home. To be caught in a larger net, shoved into a greater truck than the metal mechanical one the County Facility uses.

  ‘This is a great day,’ Ian Best said.

  ‘Yes,’ Ed Gantro agreed. ‘A great day in which a noble and effective blow has been struck for all helpless things, anything of which you could say, “It is alive.” ‘

  Regarding him intently in the narrow trickly light, Ian Best said, ‘I don’t want to go home; I want to take off for Canada now.’

  ‘We have to go home,’ Ed Gantro reminded him. ‘Temporarily, I mean. To wind things up. Legal matters, pick up what we need.’

  Ian Best, as he drove, said, ‘We’ll never get there, to British Columbia and Vancouver Island and Stanley Park and English Bay and where they grow food and keep horses and where they have the ocean-going ferries.’

  ‘No, we won’t,’ Ed Gantro said.

  ‘Not now, not even later?’

  ‘Not ever,’ Ed Gantro said.

  ‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ Best said and his voice broke and his driving got funny. ‘That’s what I thought from the beginning.’

  They drove in silence, then, with nothing to say to each other. There was nothing left to say.