It was the first day of heaven, the end of the last day of school, and they'd sneaked out of their last class so their daddies wouldn't have all their summer vacation, slipped out of town and out to the creek. The June sun shone down brilliantly, bringing up the freckles on their innocent faces, catching highlights in three heads of blond hair and one shock of brown hair. They stuck their bare feet in the water and leaned back on the grass, squinting up into the brilliantly blue sky. "What are you gonna do when you grow up?" one of the blonds, tall and slim, asked his friends.

"Come on, Bobby, we just got out of school!" another blond said, shaking straw-colored bangs out of his blue eyes.

Bobby ignored this. "I'm gonna be president," he said. "And when I'm president I'll make all the girls have to go live out in- in- Wisconsin. And we'll never have to go to bed unless we want to, and we'll watch whatever we want on TV, and I won't let parents boss kids around ever, ever, ever again. And I'll bring my brother home 'cause I'll bring everyone home." He looked up. "What 'bout you guys?"

The dark-haired boy shook his head. "I wanna be a doctor," he whispered, green eyes unfocused as he dreamed. "So many people get hurt and die, and I'm tired of it. I wanna help them somehow. Maybe old lady Sanders wouldn't've died if Doc had had help. That's what I wanna do."

The blonds looked at him oddly, but they always did. Drew hadn't grown up in their small town, hadn't been born there the way the rest of them were; he and his parents had moved in with his daddy's parents, come all the way from the big city, and sometimes his Lincoln ways shone through. He had big ideas and sometimes big words, and they put up with those because he knew the best way to make a spitball that would stick to the chalkboard and always distracted the teacher when the others wanted to leave. Plus, his brown hair made him instantly identifiable if anyone ever needed a scapegoat. It was a fine balance; if they abused him too much, he'd leave, but he knew that he needed their friendship.

One of the boys spat, watching it hit the creek water with a twisted smile. "I wanna go after the guys goin' after Bobby's brother," he said. "I'll be a hero when I come home all grown up. I wanna be one of those guys they talk to on TV. I know I could do it. It'd be easy to shoot one of them foreign guys, just as easy as they kill Americans. Anything to get out of this place."

"Oh yeah. There's so much out there. I seen some of it, but that only tells me there's more." Drew took in a deep breath.

The fourth of the boys inhaled deeply. The faint scent of corn wafted to him on the breeze, corn and fresh-cut grass. The air was so clean and crisp that it was almost like a knife through his throat, only it was good, so good that he imagined he could put it in a bottle and breathe it in some winter night when the house was piled high with snow. He'd been born in this small town, and so had his parents, and their families as far back as they could trace. This place was in his blood and bones. It was the only home he had ever known, and the only one he could imagine knowing. "Daddy'll need me on the farm," he drawled. Rummaging through his pockets, he came up with a flat, round rock and skipped it across the creek until it came up on the other bank. "I guess I'll get the farm when he's gone."

"You don't want to leave?" the would-be soldier asked in surprise.

The blond shrugged and skipped another stone across the water, counting the skips under his breath. "Doesn't matter what I want, matters what they all need."

"But what would you do if you could do anything?" Drew pressed.

"I dunno. I never left this place, and I don't think I'm ever gonna. This is home. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. It's all too big out there. Maybe when I'm old enough for college, but that's years from now." The boy spoke as if those years would never pass, that things would never change; as far as any of them knew, they'd be twelve years old on the last day of school forever, always just a few minutes away from their parents calling them home, eternally sitting on the edge of the creek and skipping stones underneath an unchanging blue sky and a steady sun.

But as he looked into the distance he saw a thin gray smudge on the horizon, the sign of a storm that would be coming in the next few hours, and coming up fast on them there was a spare figure whose dress fluttered slightly in the wind. "That's my mom," he said. "Guess I gotta go. Come by sometime when you got time."

In the middle of the night, Todd's eyes flickered open. The dream- no, memory, it was too real and too detailed to be just a dream- stayed with him. If he closed his eyes again, he could make himself believe that he was back on the bank of the creek on a warm summer's afternoon in his hometown, instead of being wrapped in the chilly embrace of a Toronto winter. He could almost feel the sun against his skin, heat in his now-tangled blond hair; he could imagine the freckles showing up on his face for the first time in years, because he hadn't freckled since he hit puberty and his skin changed too much for those little signs of innocence to stay.

Todd didn't know how badly MACC had warped his mind. The people who had actually put it to use- not its designers, because they had known better- hadn't known all its ins and outs, and even its designers hadn't known how the program's breakdown would affect other parts of his memory. All Todd knew was that sometimes he had trouble recalling things, and sometimes he didn't, and sometimes they were the same things. It had been a long time since he'd been able to remember anything of his childhood other than the bare facts that he could just as easily have seen in his army dossier.

For the first time in years he wondered what had happened to the other boys down by the creek, whatever happened to Bobby Higgins and Drew Baker and Jimmy Davis. The three of them had dreamed big, and Todd couldn't help but wonder if they'd been happy compromising their dreams when reality hit them in the face.

He'd never dreamed big at all. He hadn't expected to do anything more than go to school and learn some things that would help him on the family farm. Only in high school had he seriously considered leaving for good, or at least for a long time. He would have loved to remember their reactions to his going into the Army, going in for MACC training, becoming the iconic captor of the terrorist mastermind.

Jimmy'd wanted to go into the Army, and had envied him for receiving the pitch. Todd thought hard, and some fragments of memory came back to him. Jimmy had managed to knock up a cheerleader his sophomore year, and there'd been a shotgun wedding. He'd wanted to leave more than any of them did, but in the end he was trapped in their small town more surely than any of them. And soft-spoken Drew with his altruistic dreams of good for the world had died in a drunk driving accident, the foolish pedestrian trying to walk across the street. Bobby... Bobby had just faded into the same blah blankness that claimed most of the town, following in his father's footsteps the way his son would follow in his. It was that fate that Todd had wanted to escape when he joined the Army, because he had seen the monotony and the soul death that had overtaken them, and he wanted no part of it.

What would they think of him now, rebelling against the government, hiding in Canada? Out of all of them, he was the one who least expected to leave, and out of all of them he was the only one who had a chance to leave. But he didn't want to go further down that train of thought, because all it would do was leave him with a headache and a lot of regrets. The idyll of his small town was only a memory now, bereft of all its innocence and shorn of all its freedom.

He took a deep breath of the night air, feeling the chill wind cut into his throat like a knife; the air bore the scent of ozone, the sign of a change in the weather. It might rain, it might snow, and he wasn't attuned enough to know which one was coming. He shivered and pulled the quilt up to his chin. His eyes closed again, and slowly but surely he drifted back into dreams of June sunshine and rocks skipping across the water.