Chapter One

1.

New Paris Benjamin Franklin crouched low on hands and knees, pressing his face toward the ash gray soil. The forest surrounding him chirped, clicked, and hummed lazily in the soggy noontime heat.

A sudden rattling in the branches made him look up, for the forest had proven deceptive, these last few months. Sleepy it might be, but it dreamed of panther, Indian ambush, rattlesnake, and the corpse of Benjamin Franklin.

But it was only a flight of green parakeets, settling into a live oak. For the moment, the forest was not trying to kill Franklin. A Spaniard, this forest: disdaining to do much of anything between noon and three o’clock. So this was a good time to pry at the land’s secrets. Franklin knelt a little lower, wishing the Coweta hadn’t taken his hand lens when they tried to torture him to death. He needed it now. He continued his work with squinting eyes, sat up briefly, scribbled in his book, then peered back at the dirt.

When he heard the footsteps behind him, it was too late. Or would have been, if it hadn’t been a friend.

“Reading our futures there, Sir Wizard?”

Franklin didn’t turn. “Hello, Voltaire,” he said, the belated tingle of alarm fading. “They fascinate me. Look at them.”

The Frenchman crouched beside him, his long arms folded on narrow knees, a merry grin on a face that was mostly pointed chin. “I take it you mean the ants?” he said.

“Of course. See here, how they form a train to supply their city? I followed this one back—it goes to the corpse of an opossum, some twenty yards in that direction. For ants, that would b