Deep Sky

Chapter One

No one friendly had ever lived in the brick colonial house at the end of the cul-de-sac on Fairlane Court. Which was strange, considering how many different owners had come and gone since its construction, in 1954. Nearly twenty of them over the years. They’d all been polite enough: they’d all nodded hello when appropriate, and kept the yard meticulously neat, and never played their televisions or stereos loudly—if at all. To a man and woman, the owners had all been in their thirties, single, with neither children nor pets. They had dressed conservatively and driven dark green or dark blue sedans.

They’d also never answered the doorbell, regardless of the time of day. They’d never hung up colored lights for the holidays, or handed out candy to trick-or-treaters. Not one occupant of the house had ever invited a neighbor for dinner. And though the place seemed to change hands every two to three years, no one had ever seen a For Sale sign on the lawn, or found the address in a real-estate listing.

Strangest of all were the moving days. Despite the apparent simplicity of the men and women who’d lived in the house, every single one of them had required at least four full-sized moving vans to transfer their belongings. Some had needed upward of a dozen. These vans always backed up so snugly to the garage door that it was impossible to see what exactly was being moved in or out. And they always came at night. Always.

Neil Pruitt knew all of this, though he’d never lived on this street, and had never seen the house until tonight. He knew because he’d seen others like it; there were many others. Nineteen more here in D.C., and another ten across the river in Langley. In and around New York City and Chicago there were just under fifty each. Most cities near that size had a few dozen at least. Los Angeles had seventy-three.

Pruitt circled the decorative plantings at the center of the cul-de-sac, pulled into the driveway and got out of the car. The night was cold and moist, rich with the smells of October: damp leaves, pumpkins, smoke from a backyard fire a few houses over. Pruitt glanced at the neighboring homes as he made his way up the walk. A big two-story on the left, all lights out except in an upstairs bedroom, where laughter through cracked-open windows suggested a slumber party. A split-level ranch to the right: through the bay window at the front, he saw a couple on their couch watching a big LCD screen. The president was on TV, live from the Oval Office.

No such signs of activity from the brick colonial. Soft lighting at most of the windows, but no movement visible inside. Pruitt stepped onto the porch and put his key in the lock. No need to turn it—the mechanism beeped and then clicked three times as its computer communicated with the key. The bolt disengaged, and Pruitt pushed the door—a solid piece of steel two inches thick—inward. He stepped from the flagstone porch onto the white ceramic tile of the entryway. While the outside of the house had been updated over the years to stay current with decorating trends, the interior had enjoyed no such attention. It was clean and bare and utilitarian, as it’d been for nearly six decades. It was all the Air Force needed it to be.

The foyer was identical to its counterpart in every such house Pruitt had been in. Ten feet by ten. Eight-foot ceiling. Twin security cameras, left and right in the corners opposite the front door. He pictured the two officers on duty in the house, watching the camera feeds and reacting to his arrival. Then he heard a door slide open, around the corner and down the hall.

“Sir, we weren’t expecting a relief tonight.” A man’s voice. Adler. Pruitt had handpicked him for this post years earlier. His footsteps came down the hallway, still out of sight, accompanied by a lighter set. A second later Adler appeared in the doorway. Past his shoulder was a woman maybe thirty years old. Pretty. Like Adler she was a second lieutenant, though Pruitt had neither selected her nor even met her before. The name tag on her uniform read LAMB.

“You’re not getting one,” Pruitt said. “I won’t be staying long. Take this.”

Pruitt shrugged off his jacket and held it out. As Adler came forward to take it, Pruitt drew a Walther P99 from his rear waistband and shot him in the forehead. Lamb had just enough time to flinch; her eyebrows arched and then the second shot went through her left one and she dropped almost in unison with Adler.

Pruitt stepped over the bodies. The hallway only went to the right. The living space of the house was much smaller than it appeared from outside. There was just the entry, the corridor, and the control room at the end, which Pruitt stepped into ten seconds after firing the second shot. The chairs were still indented with the shapes of their recent occupants. He thought he could tell which had been Lamb’s; the indentation was much smaller. A can of Diet Coke sat on a coaster beside her station. In the silence Pruitt could hear it still fizzing.

He pushed both chairs aside and shoved away the few pieces of paper that lay on the desk. Long ago, the equipment in this room had filled most of the nine-by-twelve space. Over the years it’d been replaced again and again with smaller updates. Its present form was no larger than a laptop, though it was made of steel and had no hinge on which to fold itself. It was bolted to the metal desk, which itself was welded to the floor beneath the ceramic tiles. This computer controlled the system that occupied the rest of the house, the space that wasn’t easily accessed. Pruitt could picture it without difficulty, though. He looked at the concrete wall to his left and imagined staring right through it. On the other side was the cavernous space that was the same in every house like this, whether the outside was brick or vinyl or cedar shingle.

Beyond the wall was the missile bay.

Pruitt took his PDA from his pocket and set it on the desk beside the computer. Next he took out a specialized screwdriver, its head as complex as an ancient pictogram, and fitted it into the corresponding screw head on the side of the computer’s case. Five turns and the tiny screw came free. Within seconds Pruitt had the motherboard exposed. The lead he needed was at the near end. He pulled it free, and saw three LEDs on the board go red. In his mind he saw and heard at least five emergency telephones begin to ring, in and around D.C. One of them, deep in the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, had no doubt already been answered.

The response would come down on this place like a hammer. No question of it. But it would come too late. And those who responded would never guess his final intention. Not until they saw it for themselves.

He inserted the lead into a port on his PDA and switched it on. The screen lit up, the required program already running. It was one Pruitt had written himself, tailored for this purpose. The hourglass icon flickered, and then a password prompt appeared. He entered the code—a very long one—waited through another two seconds of the hourglass, and then saw the screen he’d expected. There was an input field for GPS coordinates. He pasted them in, having typed and copied them in advance, and pressed ENTER.

A second later the house shuddered. A heavy, continuous vibration set the floor and the desk humming.

Pruitt turned to the wall. He pressed his hands and then the side of his face against the concrete. Felt the animal waking up in its den.

Fifty-eight years ago the missile bay had contained a Korean-War-era Nike-Ajax. Pretty funny to picture it now, a weapon so simple and limited being trusted to defend the nation’s capital against Russian bombers and ICBMs. The Ajax fleet had been swapped out for the Hercules in the early sixties. Definitely an improvement, though still probably not up to the task. Only in the late eighties, under Pruitt’s tenure, had this program become viable—in his opinion—with the adoption of the Patriot system. A hell of a missile. But that wasn’t what was on the other side of the wall now.

Pruitt absorbed the vibration for another second, then pushed off of the wall and stood upright. He took a slip of paper from his pocket and set it on the desk beside the PDA.

The paper had a single short sentence written on it:

See Scalar.

The intended recipients would know what it meant. Pruitt himself didn’t even know. Or care.

He exited the room, leaving the PDA plugged in behind him. He returned down the corridor; where it met the entry, Adler’s blood had formed a common pool with Lamb’s, cherry red on the white tiles and nearly black where it’d saturated the grout.

Five seconds later he was out on the flagstones again, in the moist wind that smelled like leaves and pumpkins and smoke. He left his car in the driveway; already he could see the headlights of first responders, four blocks away and coming fast. He ducked around the side of the house and moved toward the backyard.

He could hear the missile from out here now. Louder every second. He heard dull thuds as heavy stabilizer arms retracted against the bay wall, and by the time he rounded the back corner of the house, the small basement windows at the rear had blown out and were venting steam into the night.

Pruitt crossed the shallow yard to the pines on the far end and stopped there, just inside them. He turned back and watched. He had to see it.

The house stood haloed by the headlights of the incoming vehicles. Tires skidded in the cul-de-sac and car doors opened and men’s voices shouted. Fast reaction. Almost fast enough.

The roof blew. The whole middle span of it. Wood splinters and asphalt shingles scattered upward like confetti, and in almost the same instant a shape knifed up through the opening.

An AMRM Sparrowhawk. Advanced multi-role missile. In keeping with the military’s crescent-wrench philosophy in recent years, the Sparrowhawk was a single tool with multiple uses. Specifically, surface-to-air and surface-to-surface. This one, stationed at this house, had only ever been meant for the defensive role, surface-to-air.

That wasn’t the role it would play tonight.

The missile, as wide as a telephone pole and almost as long, surged upward through the open roof, driven by a primary charge from the launcher below. Its momentum carried it above the treetops, maybe sixty feet higher than the roof’s peak, and just as it slowed and nearly stopped, the missile’s own engine engaged. For a third of a second it hovered almost still, like a Roman candle held upside-down. Then the flame beneath it went pure white, and the rocket screamed in a way that sounded eerily human—at a hundred times the volume—and a fast heartbeat later the thing was only a streak of light, climbing toward the speed of sound above Georgetown.

Pruitt watched it through the pine boughs. At two thousand feet its trajectory went flat. Its path defined a neat little semicircle in the sky as it hunted, and then it was gone, screaming southeast toward the ground coordinates he’d fed the PDA thirty seconds ago. The coordinates the Sparrowhawk would reach about ten seconds from now.

Movement at ground level caught Pruitt’s eye. The couple at the house next door had come out onto their rear patio, scared as hell and looking for the commotion. It was funny, in a way. Had they known, they could’ve stayed right on their couch, watching the live feed from the Oval Office.

That was where the show was going to be.

Chapter Two

Every night Travis Chase took the elevator up to the surface and went running in the desert. It was usually cool, and always clear. Tonight was no exception. He could see the machine gun flashes of a thunderstorm in the Rockies, fifty miles southwest, but above him the stars were hard and sharp in the twilight. The scrubland was solid as asphalt and took no footprints. It crunched lightly under the treads of his running shoes, his footfalls setting the cadence for his breathing. He could do six miles now without getting winded. Not bad. Forty-four years old and he was in the best shape of his life. When he’d started running in the desert, more than a year ago, two miles had been pushing it.

His circuit brought him around toward where he’d started. The loop was seven miles total, so he could walk the last one. His cell phone had built-in GPS that could plot his path and tell him when he’d covered six miles, but in recent months he’d found he didn’t need it. Habit and intuition were enough.

He slowed to a walk. His heart rate fell toward normal, and the pulse against his eardrums faded to the quiet of the desert night. This late in the year, whatever insects were native to Wyoming were long dead or dormant; there was no sound but the wind moving over the sand and dry brush, and the occasional, distant calling of coyotes.

In the trace moonlight Travis could see the low shape of the elevator housing a mile ahead. It wasn’t much to look at, even in daylight: a decrepit pole barn surrounded by the remnants of a split-rail fence. Someone could walk right by it and have no desire to investigate—if someone could get within thirty miles of it without being stopped.

This empty landscape was the most secure piece of real estate on the planet. There were no roads within a forty-mile radius. No overflights by either military or civilian aircraft. Intrusions by off-road vehicles, which were rare, were swiftly turned away by people who looked like pissed-off ranchers. They weren’t ranchers. They were something closer to soldiers, though not American soldiers. Strictly speaking, this featureless patch of eastern Wyoming was not American soil, and hadn’t been since 1978.

Travis slowed further until his footsteps became silent. Now and then, when the wind faded, he could hear the distant rumbling of the storm. He was half a mile from the elevator when his phone beeped with a text message. He took it out, switched it on and narrowed his eyes at the bright display.

NEWS. COME BACK FAST. CONFERENCE ROOM.

—PAIGE

An intense chain of lightning unwound itself sideways over the mountains, illuminating the front range. Travis switched off the phone and picked up his speed to a sprint.

Two and a half minutes later, in the deep shadows of the pole barn, he caught his breath—a full-out run could still wind him. He faced the elevator doors, opened his eyes wide and waited for the biometric camera to find one of his irises. A quick flash of red skipped across the left half of his vision, and then the doors parted in front of him, throwing hard light out onto the concrete barn floor.

He stepped inside and faced the array of buttons. All fifty-one of them. Though he only rarely had reason to press the button for the deepest level, his eyes always went to it, drawn by his awareness of what was down there. Sometimes, especially in the elevator, he could swear he felt the Breach somehow. Maybe in his bones. A rhythmic bass wave, like an alien heartbeat, five hundred feet below in its fortified cocoon.

He pressed the button for B12, and the doors closed on the desert breeze and the darkness. The cab descended.

What was the news?

Not a new arrival out of the Breach. If that’d been the case, Paige would have directed him to the Primary Lab, where newly arrived objects—entities—were always taken. Not a new discovery about an old entity, either. That, too, would’ve probably taken place in the Primary Lab, or some other testing area.

The doors opened on twelve, and Travis stepped into the hallway. Like almost any corridor in the building, at any given time, this one was deserted. Border Town was enormous relative to its population: about a hundred full-time personnel. Spread over fifty-one floors, they didn’t often bump elbows.

Travis turned the corner that led to the conference room, and saw Paige standing outside the open double doors, waiting. She had most of her attention turned inward on the room—Travis saw the glow of a television monitor reflected in her eyes—but she turned toward him as he approached. By now he could hear the ambience of a large number of people inside the room. Maybe everyone in the building.

When he reached Paige, she put her hand on his arm and left it there for a second.

“It’s bad,” she said, and led him through the doorway.

It was everyone. Standing room only. All eyes on the three large LCD panels on the right-side wall. Live news feeds: CNN, MSNBC, Fox. All three had aerial coverage of some structure on fire, surrounded by emergency crews. Travis looked from one screen to the next, seeking the clearest angle on the event, and after a few seconds the middle image pulled back and there it was.

The White House.

Burning.

More specifically, one of its wings was burning; the central portion of the house looked fine. Travis couldn’t tell whether it was the east or west wing that was on fire without knowing which way the aerial shots were pointing. He finally let his eyes drop to the captions at the bottom of each screen, and understood. An explosion, very near the Oval Office, possibly inside it. He studied the image again. Only a gutted cavity remained of the president’s office, all of it aflame despite two streams of water going into it from fire trucks on the scene.

“He was in there,” Paige said. “He was on TV, live, and then it just went to black. About a minute later they started reporting on it.”

The story resolved over the next two hours. Details came in, sketchy and then solid. The three networks must’ve had nearly identical sources—with each new piece of information, their chyrons updated almost in unison.

Twenty minutes into the coverage the secretary of state confirmed that President Garner had been killed. Vice President Stuart Holt, in Los Angeles for an environmental summit, was already in the air on his way back to Washington. He would be sworn in aboard the plane.

Travis found it hard to see Garner’s death in its proper light—its global and historical significance. Garner had been a friend, and now he was gone. That was the only way Travis could feel it, for the moment.

He tried to stay focused on the coverage. The details of the blast had already begun to crystallize. There were dozens of witnesses who’d seen a contrail in the air at the time of the explosion, though it was unclear, at first, whether it’d belonged to an aircraft or a missile.

Then, five minutes after the official announcement about President Garner, all three networks cut away from the White House to a new feed—still an aerial shot, but at a different location. A residential street somewhere. A cul-de-sac full of more emergency vehicles, mostly police cruisers but also an ambulance and a single fire truck. The house at the end of the cul-de-sac was heavily damaged in some way that was hard to make sense of. Most of its roof had been blown off, and the debris lay scattered around it, but the walls and even most of the windows appeared intact. Nothing was burning.

Around him in the conference room, Travis saw sudden looks exchanged. He glanced at Paige and saw her focusing hard on the televised images. The house. The missing roof.

A man to Travis’s left said, “Archer.”

A few others nodded, Paige among them. After a moment she seemed to feel Travis’s stare, and turned to him.

“Archer is an old Air Force program,” she said. “Goes back to the fifties. Defensive missiles concealed in civilian areas. Supposed to be a last line against a nuclear strike.”

Travis watched the implication spread across the room. President Garner had just been killed by someone in his own military.

It took less than an hour for rumors of the Archer program to filter into the broadcast coverage. Travis wasn’t surprised. Secret as the program was, it had to require hundreds of people to operate it. Maybe thousands. Impossible to keep them all quiet in the aftermath of something like this.

By two in the morning there was official confirmation that Archer existed, and that it had been used against the White House. CNN got an Air Force general on the phone who addressed those two points and then spent the next five minutes saying nothing at all in a dozen different ways. No word of a suspect. No word of a motive.

The helicopter footage remained the backdrop throughout, mostly covering the White House but occasionally returning to the cratered home on the cul-de-sac.

Travis had an idea that no further news was coming tonight, though the investigation had probably made serious headway already. No doubt there was an official suspect, dead or in custody. Those working the case probably knew most of what they would ever know. But they would be very careful parceling out that information to the public. The process would take weeks, not hours.

By 3 A.M. the crowd in the conference room on level B12 had begun to thin. Paige looked at Travis and communicated her thoughts without a spoken word.

Five minutes later they were in their residence on B16, under the covers, holding each other close in the dark. Travis could think of nothing to say. He thought about Garner. Knew Paige was thinking about him too. Only platitudes came to Travis’s mind. Garner had lived a long and dignified life. He would be remembered forever. His death had almost certainly come without pain. Maybe without awareness, even—the blast had probably killed him before he could see or hear it.

All of it true.

None of it helpful.

He kissed Paige’s forehead. Pulled her closer. Felt her body relax as sleep came on. Felt himself begin fading too.

Paige’s phone rang on the nightstand. She rolled, picked it up, squinted at the display. Travis saw by her reaction that the number was unfamiliar.

She pressed the button. “Hello?”

The caller spoke for a few seconds. Travis could discern only enough to tell that it was a man’s voice. He couldn’t make out the words.

“Yes, I’m in charge here,” Paige said. “Who is this?”

The conversation lasted five minutes. Paige hardly spoke. Just quick affirmatives to let the man know she was still listening.

When the caller finally stopped speaking, Travis glanced at Paige. In the diffuse glow from her phone, he saw her staring at empty space, her forehead knitted.

Two more syllables from the caller. It sounded like, Still there?

“Yeah,” Paige said. She shook off whatever she was trying to think of. “What you’re describing doesn’t sound familiar to me. I’ll look into it here, but you should probably assume this is a dead lead.” The man spoke briefly again, and then Paige said, “Thanks, I’ll let you know.”

She ended the call. Her eyes narrowed as if she was reviewing what she’d heard, committing relevant details to memory.

“That was the FBI,” she said.

“About Garner?”

Paige nodded.

“Do they have a suspect?”

“Yeah. Commanding officer of the crew on duty at the Archer site—a man and woman, both murdered. Cameras inside the house caught it all; the officer didn’t even try to hide his face. They’re into his financials now, and it looks like he got a giant payoff weeks ago, and spent all the time since making it liquid. Getting ready to disappear. Which he’s now done.”

“They don’t know where the money came from?”

“No, and they probably never will. They called here because the assassin left a note behind. The FBI seems to think it was addressed to us.”

“But you think they’re wrong?”

“No, I’m almost certain they’re right.”

Chapter Three

Paige pulled the covers aside, arched her body across Travis’s, and stood from the bed.

“Come with me,” she said.

She crossed the room, naked, to the desk chair where she’d left her clothes. Travis stared at her body in the soft light. Some sights were just never going to get old. Then he stood and went to his own clothes, clumped against the wall, and began pulling them on.

“The guy on the phone was Dale Nellis,” Paige said, “chief of staff to the FBI director. He read me the note—it didn’t take very long.”

She opened a drawer in the desk and tore a blank page from a notepad. Then she took out a pencil and wrote a single line:

See Scalar.

“That’s all,” she said.

Travis stared at it. He knew the word scalar as a mathematical term, but couldn’t see what meaning it might hold in the context of the attack.

“The FBI ran the word through their computers to see if anything interesting turned up,” Paige said. “A last name, an organization title, something like that. But they came up empty. A few small businesses have used that title over the years. A computer repair company, some kind of school supply maker, nothing much bigger than that.”

“Not exactly the usual suspects,” Travis said.

Paige shook her head, then nodded toward the door to the hallway. A moment later they were outside the residence, moving along the corridor toward the elevator.

Nearly every level of Border Town had the same basic layout, its hallways in the shape of a big wagon wheel. One giant ring corridor at the outside, a dozen spokes reaching inward to the central hub that housed the elevator and the stairwell.

“Nellis said he and a few guys at the top asked around,” Paige said. “Discreetly, among people they trust, mostly in the intel community. They even talked to some retired guys, on the possibility that Scalar is an older reference. Which it seems to be. So far the only people to recognize the word were both from around President Reagan’s time. One was a senator who chaired the Intelligence Committee back in the day, and the other was the deputy CIA director for a good chunk of the eighties. Both of them recalled Scalar as the name of an investigation from that time, but here’s the interesting part: neither one of them was ever cleared to know anything about it, beyond the name. Although there were some things they ended up learning anyway—things that couldn’t be hidden from them.”

“Like what?”

“Like the investigation’s budget. Whatever Scalar was—whoever was running it and whatever they were looking for—it had no spending limit. Any requested resource—I imagine things like satellite access, classified records access—was granted by the White House without delay, no questions asked. Scalar cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and spanned most of the 1980s, yet nobody in Congress, and nobody at the CIA, knew anything about it.”

They reached the elevator. Paige pressed the call button. She turned to Travis as they waited. He saw something in her eyes. Some kind of understanding.

“Nellis said he wouldn’t have believed that,” she said, “except that he heard it independently from each of these guys tonight. Even then, it’s pretty hard to swallow. He said he couldn’t imagine there was anybody out there with that kind of authority. Anyone powerful enough and secret enough to get that sort of cooperation from the United States government, with apparently zero oversight.”

Travis suddenly understood what her expression was about.

“It was us,” he said. “Scalar was a Tangent investigation.”

“I think it had to be,” Paige said. “Nellis made a few more calls, this time to higher-level people who are in power right now. He ended up getting a couple minutes on the phone with, well, I guess it’s President Holt now. Holt’s known about Tangent for some time—vice presidents are usually in the loop. When Nellis described Scalar for him, I’m sure Holt made the same assumption you and I just made.”

The elevator dinged softly and the doors parted. Travis followed Paige into the car. She pressed the button for level B48. The archives. It made sense. Though the files down there were mostly related to Breach entities and the experiments done on them over the past three decades, there were other kinds of records kept there too. If Tangent had been behind the Scalar investigation, whatever it was, the archives should contain a massive amount of data about it.

“Did the president give the FBI your number?” Travis said. That was hard to believe.

Paige shook her head. “The White House must have set up the call through a blind socket. Nellis didn’t even know my name when he introduced himself on the phone. Didn’t know anything about Tangent, either.”

Travis thought it over, watching the button display as the elevator dropped through the complex. He understood now why Paige had told Nellis it was a dead lead. If she’d told him the truth—that crucial evidence for an FBI investigation might exist here in Border Town—it would’ve created all kinds of jurisdictional problems. The FBI would’ve wanted access to this place, and they would’ve wanted to do a lot more than just look through the archives.

That wouldn’t have happened, of course. Not in a million years. The FBI would have been denied without even getting confirmation that Tangent existed. But it would’ve still been a political mess. And an unnecessary one. The simplest move was for Tangent to review the evidence itself. Then any information worth sending to the FBI could be routed through the White House, credited to a classified source. Nice and neat.

The elevator chimed again and the doors slid open on the archives. Travis followed Paige out.

The place had the look and feel of a library basement, some kind of periodical dungeon not set up for public use. Simple, black metal shelves. Narrow channels between them—just enough room for a person to pass through. The shelves reached the ceiling, ten feet up, and were lined with gray plastic binders. Each binder had a handwritten label fixed to its spine, filled out in a standard format with a given Breach entity’s name and number, followed by a string of letters and numbers Travis couldn’t make sense of. Some improvised Dewey decimal system created by Tangent’s founders back in the early years, before computerized storage had become standard.

As Travis understood it, the most recent fifteen years of data had been created on PDAs and filmed on digital camcorders. All of that information now fit easily onto a few rack-mounted servers, tucked away somewhere on this floor. But all the data older than that—roughly the same amount in terms of information content—had been written out by hand and filmed on analog tape. That data filled essentially the entire floor, ten thousand square feet of densely packed physical storage.

Paige led the way toward a clearing among the shelves, fifty feet out from the elevator. A desk stood centered in the open space.

“I take it you’ve never heard of Scalar yourself,” Travis said.

“Not even as a passing reference. Unless I’ve forgotten. And I can’t imagine I would have—whatever Scalar was, it sounds like it was a very big deal.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? That nobody ever mentioned it to you? All these years?”

“It strikes me as close to impossible,” Paige said. “If Scalar happened in the eighties, my father would’ve known all about it. So why would he have kept it from me, later on when I came to work here?”

They passed into the open space and crossed to the desk. It was a big, practical thing: four feet by eight, black metal legs and surface, the same as the shelves. Five wooden chairs shoved under it at random. The desktop was bare except for a giant binder lying on its side, gray like those on the shelves, but much thicker. Ten or twelve inches wide at the spine, the thing was essentially a cubic foot of paper encased in hinged plastic. The word INDEX adorned the cover in adhesive block letters.

Paige heaved it open to about the midpoint of the post-bound stack. There were little tabs sticking out of the pages’ sides at intervals, marking the alphabetical arrangement. The pages were tightly packed with text under headings that were mostly entity names, though some were simply the names of people, or various labs or stations within Border Town.

The entries themselves, beneath the headings, each consisted of just a date and a string of letters and numbers—the same kind that appeared on each of the shelved binders. A locator code, pointing to a specific place in the archives. Each heading had dozens of such entries below it, indicating random places all over level B48. Travis understood the basic logic: for any given entity, each time a new experiment was carried out, the results were filed away in the archives wherever space was available, and the location was recorded in the index. It was much easier to do it that way than to continually rearrange all the shelves to keep related material bunched together.

The index had clearly been updated often over the years—each page bore a mix of typed and handwritten text.

Paige flipped to the S section and navigated to where Scalar should’ve been.

It was there.

And it wasn’t.

The heading was certainly there, right at the top of its own page.

SCALAR.

Beneath it, Travis counted seventeen separate entries, with dates ranging from 1981–06–04 to 1987–11–28. The locator codes were there too. The entries looked like all the others in the index, with one exception.

They were all crossed out.

Each had a simple line drawn through it, horizontally, in pen. The same pen, for all of them. It’d been done in one sitting—a single decision to cancel it all out. Yet there’d been no real attempt to conceal what the entries said. Travis was sure he knew why—was sure Paige knew too.

Five minutes later they’d confirmed it. At every one of the shelf locations listed in the seventeen entries, the Scalar files were gone. In their place the shelves were either empty or else filled with newer, unrelated material—binders labeled with entity names. Paige opened each of them anyway and flipped through their contents, on the chance that the relevant data had simply been disguised within them. It hadn’t.

“But it was here,” Paige said. “This was a real investigation, and Tangent was behind it. It lasted at least six and a half years, and during that time they filed the paperwork here in the archives. And then they got rid of every trace of it, and as far as I know, they never even talked about it again.”

She looked at Travis. Shook her head.

“What the hell was it about?” she said.

Chapter Four

They were back in their residence on B16, in the living room. Travis was sitting in a chair by the couch. Paige was pacing a few feet away. The LCD screen was on, tuned to CNN. The coverage was the same as when they’d left the conference room upstairs; all that’d changed was that the damage to the Oval Office was now concealed by a giant white tarp, pulled tight and square over a framework of scaffolding. It looked sharp and clean and dignified. Like a flag on a coffin.

For the past few minutes the commentary had focused on Garner’s legacy, including measures he’d supported and signed into law. An extension of the tax credit for electric vehicles. An aggressive education reform bill. Additional funding for a much-derided research program at Harvard and MIT called the Methuselah Project, aimed at learning how to counter—and even reverse—human aging by the middle of the century. It’d never sounded all that crazy to Travis; no crazier, at least, than sending a person to the moon or plugging most of the world’s computers into one another.

There was no mention of the message the assassin had left behind.

“The top people at the FBI have already called the best sources they can think of,” Travis said, “including the new president, and they’ve turned up almost nothing. Our safest assumption is that they’re done making progress—that no one in power knows anything about Scalar. No one who wants to help, anyway.”

“Which means Nellis is probably right: whoever did this left the message just for us, no doubt assuming we’d know what the hell it meant.”

Travis considered the strangeness of their situation. “Not only don’t we know who we’re playing against, we don’t even know what the game is. We better find out on our terms before we find out on theirs.”

Paige sank into the couch. “I don’t understand why my father never told me about Scalar.”

That would be a tricky question to answer. Paige’s father was dead, along with nearly every member of Tangent who’d known him. Paige herself, though only thirty-two years old, was by far the most senior member of the organization, with just over a decade’s involvement. There was a reason for that. Three years ago, the chain of events that’d originally brought Travis to Border Town had also, in the end, brought about the deaths of all but a handful of its inhabitants. The cataclysmic violence responsible still visited Travis’s dreams. Paige’s, too. He woke her from them a few times a month.

In time new members had been recruited, as quickly as caution afforded. Within a couple years the ranks had been essentially refilled. Then, while Paige and most of the senior personnel were on business in Washington, D.C., they’d come under attack by heavily armed assailants—the opening salvo of a new conflict. Paige alone had survived. From that moment on she’d been the only person in the world capable of leading Tangent. The strongest of the few threads tying its present form to its past.

“I worked here alongside my father for the bulk of the last decade,” she said. “Him and a hundred others. And most of them had been here since the beginning, which means Scalar happened on their watch. Why wouldn’t a single person have ever spoken of it?”

“Can’t have been a trust issue,” Travis said.

“Not a chance. We all trusted each other with everything. With our lives.”

“What other reason, then?” Travis said. “Embarrassment?”

Paige glanced at him, visibly uncomfortable at the thought. She shook her head, but Travis thought he saw more uncertainty than refutation in the gesture.

For thirty seconds neither of them spoke. The just-audible television took the edge off the silence.

Then Paige’s eyes widened a little and she said, “Blue.”

The word seemed to surprise her even as it came out. She stood from the couch and crossed to the short hallway leading to the bedroom. Travis stood and followed.

She had the computer’s monitor switched on by the time he entered the room. The computer itself had already been running.

“Blue status,” Paige said. She clicked open the file manager and navigated through a series of folders. Travis didn’t even try to keep track of them. “It’s a set of security measures we use for people who retire from Tangent.”

“I didn’t know anyone ever had retired from Tangent,” Travis said. “Except me, for the time I was gone.”

“It almost never happens,” Paige said. Her attention stayed with the computer as she spoke. “Three times, total, in thirty-four years. Not counting you.”

She reached the end of a directory tree, and Travis saw a folder icon that looked identical to all the rest, except that it was tinted blue. Paige clicked it. An input field opened, calling for two distinct passwords. Paige typed them quickly; only the second required any thought.

A personnel file opened on the screen. The format was familiar enough to Travis. He’d seen his own file and several others during his time here.

But he’d never seen any of the three names that now appeared on the monitor.

Rika Sengupta.

Carrie Holden.

Bartolo Conti.

“All three were here from the early days,” Paige said. “My father probably recruited them himself.”

Within seconds Paige clicked open each of their files and arranged them in three separate windows, visible at the same time.

All three had joined Tangent between the summer of 1978—the year the organization was formed—and the end of 1979. Original cast members, so to speak. Travis scanned the retirement dates for each file. Sengupta, Holden, and Conti had resigned in 1989, 1994, and 1997, respectively. All three had been with Tangent for the entire time Scalar was under way.

“Sengupta and Conti left for health reasons,” Paige said. “Both were very old when they retired—they wanted to spend time with their families while they could. Neither made it to the new millennium.”

“And Carrie Holden?”

“I only know a little about her. She was young when Tangent formed—early thirties. So, mid to late forties when she retired in ninety-four. She’d be into her sixties now.”

“Why did she retire?”

“I don’t know. I remember my father talking about her, sometimes. She was pretty important around here, in her day. But he never said why she left.”

She clicked to expand Holden’s file, filling the screen with it. There was a thumbnail photo that probably dated to the late seventies: a young woman with blond hair and green or hazel eyes. The file’s text dealt mostly with her pre-Tangent background—she had degrees in chemical and physical engineering from Caltech. There was nothing about her retirement, neither the reason for it nor the identity she’d assumed upon leaving.

“She’d have to know something about Scalar,” Paige said. “Certainly more than anyone else we’re going to find.”

“Can we find her? If she’s hidden as well as I was, her new name won’t be in the computer. Only the person who created the identity would know it—someone with Tangent in 1994—and that person has to be dead by now.”

Paige nodded. “That person was my father.”

“I don’t suppose he randomly let the information slip.”

“No. Not directly.”

Paige swiveled her chair to the side. She traced a path on the carpet with her foot, back and forth.

“I think they had a history,” she said. “She and my father. Some connection during the time they both lived here. He never said so, but that was the impression I got. The way he spoke when her name came up. Things other people said, and stopped short of saying.” Her foot slowed and came to rest. She looked at the computer but made no move to use it. “There was this strange little moment, one time. One of those things you end up filing away and never really thinking about, because it’s awkward. It was probably five years ago. I walked into my father’s office in the Primary Lab, and he had two things on his computer screen: a picture of Carrie Holden, and a Google satellite map. When he heard me come in, he flinched and closed them both, the map first and then the picture. It was very out of character for him—hiding something, being jumpy. But a second later when he turned to me, it was like nothing had happened. Totally casual—he ignored the moment entirely. So did I. I pretty much had to. And later on, when I had time to think about it, I was glad I’d done that, because I was pretty sure of what I’d walked in on. I think the map must’ve been the place Carrie relocated to, and my father was just . . . thinking about her. No special reason. You know what I mean?”

Travis nodded. He thought of the two years he’d worked in a shipping warehouse in Atlanta before coming back to Tangent. On occasion he’d found himself slapping a label onto a box of brake pads bound for Casper, Wyoming, less than eighty miles from Border Town. He’d stare at the box for a few seconds, dwelling on the fact that in a day or two it would be much closer to Paige Campbell than he himself would probably ever be again. Irrational as hell, but he’d done it all the time. It wasn’t hard to imagine Peter Campbell, in a private moment, gazing at a map of the place where Carrie Holden had ended up.

“You didn’t see the map clearly enough to get the location,” Travis said.

Paige shook her head. “There wasn’t time to see it, even if I’d wanted to. I was way across the room, and it was gone by the time I’d taken a few steps.”

She went quiet again. The only sound was the soft drone of the computer’s cooling fan.

Travis met her stare.

He knew what she was about to say.

She said it.

“We’ve both been thinking the same thing for the last ten minutes: there’s a way I can find out exactly what my father knew about Scalar, and failing that, I can certainly learn what location that map was showing. The same approach works for both problems.”

Travis nodded. “I’ve been trying to think of an alternative.”

“Me too. But there isn’t one. We could rack our brains all day and it’d be for nothing.” She looked at him. “You hate that I’m the one who has to do it. If you were the one, I’d hate it too. But I wouldn’t try to stop you. Okay?”

Travis exhaled. He thought about it for another five seconds. Finally he nodded again. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Five

Level B42. The Primary Lab. Other than the chamber that held the Breach itself, this was the most important place in Border Town. All entities that were unique or nearly so, sufficiently powerful, and still being studied on a regular basis were stored on this level, behind blast doors as heavy as those at NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain. Travis and Paige passed through them into a long central corridor with extensions branching away left and right. B42 was one of the few levels with a distinct layout—it was more than twice the size of any other floor, its boundaries having been expanded over the years by excavation of the surrounding deep soil.

The place was deserted. Their footsteps echoed strangely in the silence.

They came to the door they needed within a minute. It was standard sized but heavy duty, with a palm scanner beside the lock. Paige put her hand to it and a moment later they were through into the space beyond, a room the size of a walk-in closet with a bank of small vault doors on the opposite wall. One bore a magnetic placard with crisp black lettering:

ENTITY 0728—TAP

Travis felt his jaw tighten at the sight of the name. Paige looked at him and noticed.

“I’m not a fan either,” she said. “Let’s get it over with.”

She crossed to the vault, turned the dial back and forth in sequence, heard the lock disengage, and hauled the door open. Inside was a single tiny object: a rich green translucent cube half an inch across. It might have been a blank die cut from emerald. But it wasn’t.

Paige stared at it a moment, then picked it up and turned from the vault. Her movements were casual in a way that seemed deliberate to Travis. A forced calm. He didn’t blame her. She crossed the small room, stepped back out through the heavy door, and stopped in the middle of the corridor.

“Right here is as good as anywhere,” she said.

Travis joined her in the hallway. For a second her calm facade slipped. Then she discarded it altogether and sat down at the base of the wall. She leaned her back against it and drew her knees close to her body. Travis sat beside her.

“Deep, slow breaths,” he said.

“I know.”

“Give anything to trade places with you.”

“I know.”

She had the Tap lying on her open palm, eye level in front of her. Travis watched how the light played over and through it. Strange, silvery shapes in its depths. Tiny swirls and arcs, like scimitar blades.

Then in one fluid move Paige took the cube between two fingertips and put it to her temple. She pressed it against her skin, and Travis saw the thing’s edges blur as it vibrated.

Paige’s breathing accelerated in spite of her efforts. She reached across her midsection with her other arm and took hold of Travis’s hand.

“You’re okay,” he whispered.

She nodded quickly, probably not even processing the words.

Then it happened. The little cube liquefied in the span of a second, and collapsed to what looked like a thick drop of aloe gel between Paige’s fingertips. In almost the same instant the top of the gel rose and formed a point—and then a filament. A wirelike structure maybe a centimeter tall, thin as fine guitar string. It stood there swaying to the tremor of Paige’s body. Then it pointed itself inward and plunged through the skin and bone of her temple.

Her hand spasmed and gripped Travis’s tightly. Her breaths turned into little cries, betraying the pain but only just. Travis knew how much it hurt. He’d experienced it himself. The Tap had emerged from the Breach during the two years he’d been away, but had still been in frequent testing when he’d returned. Like many others he’d volunteered to have a go at it, and his single use had gone as smoothly as he could’ve hoped. Despite the pain involved, he’d intended to use it again.

Then a woman named Gina Murphy had taken a turn with it, and everything had changed. In the six months since, not a single person had used the Tap.

Travis watched as the gel drop shrank by the second. The thing was feeding itself into Paige’s skull through the tiny hole made by the filament. Though Travis couldn’t see what was happening inside, he could easily recall how it felt: like a living thread, ever lengthening, darting and slipping among the deep folds of the brain’s surface. Flitting and hunting and finding its way like a snake’s tongue. Every second of it agony.

But that was normal for the Tap. So far, everything was going well.

Paige’s cries intensified. Her eyes were screwed shut.

“I’m right here,” Travis whispered.

Five seconds had passed since the lead end had gone in. The gel mass on her fingertips was half spent. The insertion never took longer than ten or twelve seconds.

Paige got control of her breathing just before the end. She went quiet and let her face relax. The last trace of gel shrank to wire thickness and slipped in, leaving nothing but a tiny drop of blood at the entry point.

Paige opened her eyes.

“Better?” Travis said.

She nodded.

The tendril always stopped moving once it was fully inside; the pain stopped with it, for the most part.

She was still gripping his hand. With his fingertip against her wrist, he could feel her pulse pushing three beats per second, though it was slowing by the moment.

“I’m ready,” Paige said. “Catch me if I start to tip over.”

“Wait.” He repositioned himself so that he was seated facing her. She got the idea and scooted forward from the wall, until their chests were touching and their legs were around each other’s hips. He hugged her close to him, and she rested her head on his shoulder.

“No worries about falling over,” he said.

She nodded against him and let her body relax, her breathing now almost back to normal.

“See you in three minutes and sixteen seconds,” she said.

She felt the effect begin as soon as she closed her eyes. One moment there was a floor beneath her and Travis’s arms were around her, and the next she was gone, floating in some neural equivalent of a sensory deprivation chamber. She felt the Tap vibrating softly inside her head, its pathway wandering from her temple across the underside of her skull, to the parietal lobe on the opposite rear side. No sense of her limbs. No sense of anything but her thoughts.

And her memories.

She focused on the one she wanted. Envisioned her father’s office—her office, now—on that day five years ago. He’d been sitting with his back to her, the map on one half of his monitor and Carrie Holden’s face on the other.

The image came to her almost at once—much more easily and vividly than it normally could have. She saw it from her own point of view as it’d been in that moment, just passing through the office doorway, her shoe scuffing the tile and making her father flinch. She froze the image just like that, in the instant before he closed the map.

The Tap was a hell of a thing. The memory image hovered in front of her like a projection, as complete and accurate as a high-res photo of that moment would’ve been.

But this capability wasn’t what made the Tap special. If it had been, she would’ve come up empty: at this range she couldn’t read any of the map’s labels. Not the street names. Certainly not the town’s name, if one was there. She could resolve only a road running north and south, and a modest grid of streets clumped along the middle of its length. A few lesser roads strayed off left and right from the bunch. It could’ve been any of a hundred thousand small towns in the world. The image told her nothing.

She allowed the memory to slip forward in time. The desk and computer began to grow in her field of view as she advanced into the room.

Then her father’s hand moved on the mouse, and the map vanished—its clarity had improved hardly at all.

She froze the image again, then let it begin to run backward. Her viewpoint drifted away toward the door behind her. The map popped onto the screen again. Now came the doorway’s edge, sliding into her view from the side. With it came the scuff of her foot, sounding eerie in both reverse and slow motion. She pulled back all the way into the corridor and kept going, retreating to maybe five seconds before she’d entered the room. She knew from experience that if she wanted to, she could play the memory stream forward or backward at just about any speed she could make sense of. It was scarcely different from rewinding or fast-forwarding a video file. She could plunge back through a spastic wash of images at an hour per second, skim through a day in less than half a minute, then slow down and dial in on anything she wanted to see. Every split second of it would be rich with photo-accurate detail. Every moment of her life was there to be revisited and studied. It should’ve been impossible—with even her passing grasp of neuroscience she knew that. Human memory was good, but not this good. However adept the Tap was at pulling information from her brain, this much information shouldn’t have been there to begin with. The Tap was a hell of a thing.

Yet this function was still not what made it special—or difficult to accept as possible. Not by a country mile on either score.

Paige let the image freeze again.

Five seconds from the open doorway. Out of sight beyond it, her father was staring at Carrie Holden and the map, unaware of Paige’s approach in the corridor.

Perfect.

To use the Tap’s real selling point, all she had to do now was wait. The controls were simple and intuitive. A few seconds passed, the memory still frozen, and then she began to feel her feet beneath her. She was hovering in the void, but her feet tingled as if they could sense the ground half an inch below them.

She willed herself to drop, and felt her shoes connect solidly with the surface.

In that instant the memory came to life. It was no longer an image in front of her—it was a world around her: the hallway and the fluorescent lights and the hum of air exchangers and the trace smell of cleaning solution on the floor. Her body was there too, propelled forward by its own momentum—she’d been mid-stride at this point in the memory. The movement almost threw her off balance as she came to a stop. She put out one hand and caught the wall, and silently halted herself two feet short of the doorway.

To all of her senses she was really standing here, in this moment that was five years gone. Her father was really in the next room, just beyond the edge of this doorway. The Tap let you relive memories exactly as they’d been—but that still wasn’t what made it special.

What made it special was that it let you relive them as they hadn’t been.

Paige moved forward into the doorway.

She took care not to let her shoe scuff the floor.

She saw her father seated at the desk, staring at the map and the picture of Carrie. He had no idea Paige was there.

She took a step into the room. Then another.

He sat there, adrift in his thoughts, eyes fixed on the screen.

Another step, and another.

She could see the map more clearly now than before. She was closer to it than she’d gotten in real life.

Another step.

Still not close enough to resolve the words on the screen.

But almost.

When she’d heard the early accounts from those who’d first used the Tap, she hadn’t believed them. It just couldn’t be true; how could you remember details you hadn’t actually seen the first time around? Then she’d tried it herself, and there’d been no more denying it. In fact the Tap’s power was far greater than she’d supposed in the beginning. You could do more than just cross a room you hadn’t crossed and read words you hadn’t been close enough to read. You could pick up a book you hadn’t opened at the time—or ever—and flip to page 241. You’d see the words on that page as they existed in real life, and you could verify it for yourself after snapping out of the memory and finding a copy. If she wanted to, Paige knew she could back out of her father’s office right now and, in the middle of this memory, go upstairs and schedule a flight to Paris. She could take that flight and walk the Champs-Élysées, and it would be swarming with the very same tourists who’d been there on this day five years ago. The scene would be accurate to the last detail. Every lock of hair brushed from a forehead. Every smile.

As with all entities, there were only guesses as to how it worked. The technician who’d spent the most time testing it, a man named Jhalani who’d once been a colleague of Stephen Hawking’s at Cambridge, imagined the Tap to be a kind of antenna. Clearly it did more than just draw information from the user’s brain—Jhalani believed it drew from something quite a bit grander: the set of all possible universes. Paige had heard of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but only as an interesting hypothetical notion. She’d been surprised to learn from Jhalani that it was actually a mainstream idea in modern physics. The thrust of it was that every event that could go one way or another actually went both. Every time you looked at wheat bread and white bread and chose white, some other version of you, out there in the great who-the-hell-knows, chose wheat. Physicists mainly talked about it happening at the level of subatomic particles, but if it applied down at that scale, then it certainly applied to loaves of bread and flights to Paris and shoe scuffs on tiled floors. In the end, Paige thought Travis had summed the Tap up best: it let you remember not just everything you’d done, but everything you could have done. A hell of a thing.

She took another step toward her father’s desk. She’d be in his peripheral vision soon—right about at the point where she could read the map. The margin would come down to inches at best.

It was critical that she get this right the first time—the first time would be the only time. The Tap’s one limit was that you couldn’t revisit the same memory twice. The techs liked to say that a memory was burned after you relived it. Not only couldn’t you drop into it again, you couldn’t even remember it the old-fashioned way afterward. The original would be forever replaced by the revision. Therefore an especially cherished moment—a first kiss, say—was better left alone.

Another step.

If it came down to it, she had options. This was, for all its considerable bells and whistles, only a memory. Nothing she did here would be of consequence in the real world after she woke up. Which meant she could leap at her father, shove him away from the computer, and read the map before he had time to react. At that point she could simply be done with the whole thing—to end this memory she needed only to concentrate hard on her last glimpse of reality: she and Travis sitting in the deserted corridor on B42. A good ten seconds of that image would take her right back to it.

But she hoped to avoid attacking her father. Doing so would preclude the other move she planned to make here. The more obvious move, by far, though she wished she could forgo it.

Another step. And another.

The labels on the map were right at the brink of her discernment now.

Another step.

She could see the number on the big road running north and south. U.S. 550, it looked like. She thought that was somewhere in Colorado. Just above and to the left of the grid of streets was a word—almost certainly the town’s name. A short word.

She squinted.

Ouray.

Ouray, Colorado. She’d heard of it. Some friends in college had stayed there when they went skiing at Telluride.

Good enough. If she really wanted to, she could end the memory now.

A big part of her did want to. The same part that hated the second move.

Which was simply to talk to her father.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to talk to him. Quite the opposite. She’d been very close to him, especially in their last years together, and then she’d lost him in the worst imaginable way. When she’d first learned what the Tap could do, she’d considered reliving a moment with him. Something happy and good and warm, to replace the ending life had given them.

But she’d resisted. Always. As real as it would feel, the moment would be fake. And desecratory, somehow. The whole notion had seemed wrong from the beginning.

It still did.

She watched him sitting there, unaware of her. She took a breath and smelled his aftershave. She couldn’t remember smelling it on anyone since she’d lost him. All those years, that scent had just been part of the background. A thing to hardly notice, if at all. It could make her cry right now, if she wasn’t careful. She let the emotions swim a few seconds longer, then shoved them all down into the deep.

Time to do this.

She backed away from the desk, turned and left the room without a sound. She walked to a spot in the hallway ten feet from the door, pivoted and faced it again.

And cleared her throat loudly.

She heard her father’s chair squeak at once, and heard the mouse scrape on his desktop.

She walked to the doorway and leaned in, and found him staring at a file directory. She knocked on the frame and he looked up at her.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

Her throat constricted; she couldn’t help it. Jesus, even a random moment like this. Especially a random moment like this. The kind they’d had a million of—should’ve had a million more of.

She swallowed the tightness and stepped into the room. “I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

No reason to drag things out: “What was Scalar?”

He didn’t quite flinch. It was more subtle than that—all in the eyes. A flicker of fear and then perfect calm. He tilted his chair back and appeared to search his thoughts.

“Rings a bell,” he said. “Where’d you come across it?”

“In the archives. There’s an index page for it, but all the entries are crossed out.”

“Oh—I remember. Let me guess, the entries went from the early to late eighties.”

Paige nodded.

“It was a clerical thing,” her father said. “Had to do with videotape formats, way back. We used to shoot everything on standard VHS, and then we switched over to VHS-C—digital was still a ways off. Anyway, when we made the switch we decided to transfer all the old stuff too, for shelf-life. Huge pain in the ass. Couple thousand hours of stock. Probably took us six years or more, on and off.”

He shrugged, waiting for her to let it go.

She returned his gaze and wondered if he’d ever lied to her before this. Sure, he’d kept his work with Tangent secret from her, all through her childhood, but what choice had he had? This was different. And harder to stomach than she’d have guessed.

“That all you wanted to know?” he said.

Only a memory. She held onto that idea like it was a handrail at the edge of a cliff. If she called him on his lie, she wouldn’t actually be hurting him. He wasn’t real.

“Honey?” he said. “Everything okay?”

“I’ve already asked some of the others about Scalar,” she said. “No one wants to say much, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t about transferring videotapes.”

His expression went cold.

“There was government involvement,” she said. “And it cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I want to know what it was.”

He stared. He seemed to be coming to some careful decision. When he finally spoke, it was in a calming tone, but one full of fear—for her. As if she were standing there with a gun to her head.

“Paige, you don’t want to get into this.”

“I have a right to know. And I don’t appreciate being lied to.”

“You’re right—I lied about the VHS stuff. But you lied too. No one here in Border Town told you a thing about Scalar. There are maybe half a dozen who know the parts you just described, and none of them would’ve said anything without coming to me first. Which means you talked to someone on the outside. And that scares the hell out of me.”

She couldn’t think of what to say to that. Almost every word had caught her off guard.

Her father stood from his desk and crossed to her. He stared at her with that strange, minefield caution still in his eyes.

“Who have you spoken to?” he said.

“First tell me what Scalar is.”

“Paige, this is more serious than you can know. If you’ve talked to the wrong people, you may have already triggered things we can’t stop.”

“Then tell me. Everything.”

He shook his head. “Knowing about Scalar puts a person at risk. I wouldn’t tell you a word of it to save my life. Now I need to know exactly who you spoke to. I’m not kidding.”

“If others here know about this, then I should know too—”

He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him—she had to step fast to stay balanced—and shouted into her face. “Who did you talk to?”

She pulled her arm away, turned and ran. Through the doorway, along the corridor, the lights sliding by and her father’s footsteps coming fast behind her. She shut her eyes as she ran. Pictured the deserted B42, where she and Travis were sitting. It was hard to focus on it now.

“Paige!”

Running. Eyes shut tight. Only a memory.

Travis held on to Paige and waited. Three minutes, sixteen seconds. It always took that long, no matter how much time someone spent inside a memory. During his own use of the Tap, Travis had revisited a random night of his stretch in Atlanta. He’d dropped into the middle of a long shift at the warehouse, then just walked out of the place and got in his Explorer. He drove west all that night and all the next day, stopping only for gas, food, and a couple naps, and reached the Pacific in about thirty-six hours.

Had he wanted to, he could’ve stayed in the memory for months—probably even years. Techs had remained under for as long as six weeks without encountering trouble. They’d even tried staying under while catching up to the present time and surpassing it; had it worked they would’ve found themselves remembering their own futures, a trick with all kinds of fun potential. But all attempts to do that had failed—even the Tap had its boundaries. Subjects hit the present and saw their vision start flashing green and blue like some system-crash warning, and then they involuntarily emerged from the memory—three minutes and sixteen seconds after going under, as always.

Only one person had ever come back sooner. Gina Murphy. Her eyes had popped open at around two minutes and thirty-five seconds, and she’d screamed and held her head as if it were being pried apart. The screaming had lasted for over a minute, while Travis and others carried her to the medical quarters. Along the way Gina managed to evict the Tap from her head—another intuitive control, you got it out by simply wanting it out—but that didn’t end the pain. Her death ended it, around the time they set her on a bed in medical. By then she was bleeding from every opening in her face, including her eyes. An Army medical examiner, off-site, did the autopsy the following day. The results, understandably, were unprecedented in medical literature. Gina had died from laceration and hemorrhaging of the brain, confined to a narrow pathway atop the neocortex. In the doctor’s words, it looked like someone had taken a radial saw to the contents of her head, but had managed to do it without cutting the skull.

More disturbing than those answers were the questions that didn’t have any. Above all, what had gone wrong? Had something about Gina’s biochemistry triggered the problem? Had she used the Tap in some incorrect way? What would that even mean? She’d gone under to relive a memory, like everyone else had done—some sibling’s birthday party she’d missed years ago. The fact was that the questions weren’t just unanswered. They were unanswerable. As with all entities, Tangent was simply out of its depth. There was a way to get yourself killed using the Tap, and no victim would ever live to say what it was.

Travis watched the time on his phone.

Two minutes and thirty-five came and went.

He relaxed only by a degree.

Three minutes.

Three minutes and ten.

Fifteen.

Sixteen.

Paige jerked against him and took a hard breath.

“Fuck,” she whispered.

She raised her head from his shoulder.

“One for two,” she said. She rubbed her forehead, looking badly rattled by something. “I’ll explain while we wait for the plane.”

Chapter Six

Before they’d even returned to their residence, Paige called Bethany Stewart—one of the youngest people in Tangent, at twenty-five, and very likely the smartest. Bethany answered on the second ring with no edge of sleep in her voice, despite it being four in the morning.

“I need DMV files, with photos, for everyone in Ouray, Colorado,” Paige said. She spelled out the town’s name. “Narrow the results to females in their sixties, and send them to my computer.”

“Take five minutes,” Bethany said.

It took three—and less than another two for Travis and Paige to spot Carrie Holden among the candidates. She’d dyed her hair dark brown, but nothing else had changed except her age. Her name in Ouray was Rebecca Hunter.

They were in the air by 4:20. Though Tangent kept no aircraft on-site at Border Town, it had a small fleet stationed at Browning Air National Guard Base in Casper, ten minutes’ flight time away.

The jet, a Gulfstream V with seating for eighteen, felt enormous with only the two of them in the cabin. The pilots’ voices up front were lost under the drone of the engines. Travis looked out as the aircraft climbed, but there was only unbroken darkness below. The nearest towns were faint pinpricks of light, far out on the plain beyond the limits of the Border Town Exclusion Zone.

For a few minutes neither spoke. The jet’s turbofans throttled back an octave as the aircraft reached altitude and leveled off.

“You’re thinking about it,” Paige said.

She didn’t have to frame it as a question any more than she had to specify what it was.

It was almost all Travis thought about these days.

He nodded without meeting her eyes.

Fourteen months ago Travis had rejoined Tangent after two years of self-imposed exile. He’d spent the fourteen months doing the same kind of work as everyone else in Border Town—helping to study Breach entities, both new and old—while also cramming for hours a day to give himself the underpinning of scientific literacy that every other Tangent recruit had come prepackaged with. He’d taken to it surprisingly well. At ten months he’d passed the equivalent of MIT’s Calculus 4 exam, and had at least a solid undergrad-level hold on physics, chemistry, and biology. The joke was that none of it really mattered where entities were concerned: the smartest people in the world were probably about as qualified as sparrows to study the objects that emerged from the Breach. Still it was nice to speak the same technical language as everyone else, and Travis had found his awe of the Breach only deepening as his intellect grew. Like staring at the night sky through increasingly sharp eyes.

More to the point, his recent training meant he could do real scientific work at Border Town. He felt like he belonged there now—as a contributor, not just an outsider taking up space.

But that wasn’t why he’d come back.

That wasn’t it.

“Are you wondering if there’s a connection?” Paige said. “Between whatever’s going on right now and . . . the thing about you?”

“I’m always wondering that,” Travis said. “Every time something new comes along, I ask myself if it’s all starting. Sooner or later, the answer will be yes.”

The issue was complex, but Travis thought of it in simple terms. Like delineated notes in some PowerPoint presentation. Or individual black flies circling his head.

The first piece of it was certain: somewhere down the road, Tangent would learn to use the Breach to send messages to the past—propelling them into the tunnel from this end, against the resistance force at its mouth, in such a way that they would re-emerge before they were sent in. The reason Travis was certain of this was that two messages had come back already. Some future Paige, and some future Travis, had given their lives to send them—the physical process of doing so was unavoidably fatal.

There were lots of details, but they all shook out to this: something bad was coming. Something that would end about 20 million lives. Something Travis himself would be responsible for, and might have no choice but to do, because to not do it would be worse.

Paige’s future self, perhaps acting on limited information, had opposed the action—whatever it was. Her message to the past had been a retroactive order—to herself—to kill Travis, in the hope of preventing this thing from happening at all.

Travis had countered her move by sending his own message—a messenger, really: a radically advanced, self-aware handheld computer called Blackbird, though almost everyone knew it as the Whisper. The Whisper had emerged even further in the past than Paige’s message to herself, and had set about manipulating people and rewriting history in order to put Travis in front of the Breach when Paige’s message came through.

In doing so, it’d allowed him to intercept it.

In the present, Travis and Paige had only limited clues as to what the hell it all meant. Their future selves had sent perfectly contradicting pleas, each important enough to merit dying in the bargain. All that differentiated the sacrifices was that Travis’s had been sent after Paige’s—it must’ve, since it’d been a response to hers. Had he known something she didn’t?

The details ended there. That far-off Travis had withheld them, no doubt fearing they would turn his present self away completely. All Travis could do was wait for it. Wait for any sign that it’d begun. The first link in the chain that would pull him down into the dark.

Down toward it.

“Let’s not dwell on it too much,” Paige said. “Save tomorrow for tomorrow, right? With any luck we won’t live to see it anyway.”

The man in the white parka had a name—Dominic—but his employers didn’t know it. Maybe they had a nickname for him, or more likely a number, but if so they never addressed him by it. They didn’t address him at all. They just called and gave him instructions. They were the only ones who knew the number for the blue cell phone.

That phone had rung last night while Dominic was painting the den in his condo in Santa Fe. A nice rich green that contrasted well with the white trim and the walnut desk. Dominic set the roller in the tray and answered before the ringtone reached the first drumbeat of David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Dominic listened as the caller spoke, committing everything to memory, then hung up and went to his closet and opened the cavity behind the back wall. He selected a white parka with battery-powered heating good for twelve hours of lying still in the cold, and a matte-white Remington 700 with a four-power scope. Two minutes later he was in his car en route to the private terminal at Santa Fe County Municipal.

Now he was lying prone in the snow five hundred feet above and half a mile east of Ouray, Colorado. He lay at the pinched, far end of a valley that rose from the town’s outskirts. The town looked like a snow globe village, its streetlights casting cones in the big papery flakes that were coming down. A halo of light-bleed surrounded Ouray itself—a barrier of visual warmth against the dark.

Dominic lay far outside that warmth, out in the deep, empty night.

So did the cabin he was watching.

He put his eye to the scope and panned across the windows. A pale glow rimmed the blinds at one of them—maybe a fluorescent light in a laundry room left on all night. Every other window was dark. There was a mercury lamp on a post in the front yard, though its glow served only to make the cabin appear lonelier. Only two other structures stood in the valley: a low-slung ranch and a mobile home, both tucked in close to town. The cabin was on its own.

Dominic raised his eye from the scope and looked at his watch. Not quite five in the morning. He’d taken position just after midnight. Nothing about the cabin had changed since then. Daylight was two hours away, but it would present no problem when it came. Dominic would remain invisible, and so would the five-man team he knew was lying much closer to the place—probably within forty yards of the front door.

Chapter Seven

They landed at Telluride Regional and rented a Jeep using the perfect false identities that, in recent years, all Tangent personnel traveled under. Travis drove. They rolled into Ouray from the north at a quarter to six in the morning, the still-dark streets of the town all but empty.

Travis swung left off of Main Street onto the valley road that led to Rebecca Hunter’s address. He thought he could see the place already, high in the darkness above town. A cabin in a little pool of light, seeming almost to float in the void. The emptiness around the place disquieted him on some level. His hand went to the shape of the SIG Sauer P226 holstered beneath his jacket. In his peripheral vision he thought he saw Paige do the same.

There were entities they could’ve brought along to make this trip less dangerous, but Tangent rarely sanctioned taking Breach technology outside Border Town. The risk was obvious: if things went badly, the entities could end up in someone else’s hands. It’d happened before, with one of the most dangerous things ever to emerge from the Breach: a full-body suit that rendered its wearer perfectly transparent in every kind of light. The resulting misery and violence had plagued Tangent for years before they recovered the damned thing—no one wanted to go through it again.

“Wonder if she’s an early riser,” Paige said.

“She is today, like it or not.”

They pulled into the cabin’s drive sixty seconds later, the headlights sweeping over a landscape of low evergreen shrubs and scattered pines, all shrouded by a four-inch layer of snow. Travis killed the lights and the engine and they got out. Their feet crunched on gravel beneath the powder.

The cabin was single-story, closer to small than big. Maybe two bedrooms in there, depending on their size. No sign of movement yet. There was a light at one window, but Travis had seen that long before they pulled in. If Rebecca—Carrie—had noticed their arrival, it wasn’t evident from out here.

There was an older model Ford F–150 nosed up against the place, matching the description in the DMV registration. Its tire tracks, all but erased by the night’s snowfall, led back out to the road.

A layer of rock salt had been scattered around the cabin’s entry to a radius of ten or twelve feet, reducing the ground there to moist gravel. Travis and Paige crossed it and went to the door, a heavy construction of knotted pine planks with no window. Its one notable feature was a peephole. Travis pressed the doorbell and heard the chime sound inside.

For five seconds nothing happened. He was reaching for the button again when a light came on at the far end of the house, to their left. Another ten seconds. Then footsteps, drawing close and stopping. Travis imagined Carrie Holden standing right there with her eye to the peephole, a foot and a half away from them. What could they look like to her? What could any two strangers look like at 5:50 in the morning? It occurred to him that she might simply refuse to open the door. He wondered what they would do in that case, but only for a second—the lock disengaged and the door swung inward eight inches, and Carrie Holden stared out at them through the gap, clad in a quilted robe.

She looked older than in the DMV picture, as Travis had expected; the license had been updated three years ago. Maybe sick with something, too—her features seemed drawn and pale—though she was perfectly alert. Her eyes went back and forth between the two of them.

“We’re with Tangent,” Paige said. “We need to speak to you—Ms. Holden.”

If any of that startled the woman, she didn’t show it. Her eyes stayed fixed on Paige’s. Then she exhaled softly and nodded, not upset but nowhere near happy, either. She pulled open the door and stepped back to admit them.

Inside, the cabin was close to what Travis had pictured: the cozy side of rustic. Timber walls, rough-hewn beams supporting the vaulted ceiling, potbellied woodstove on the hearth. The huge living room window was a living postcard of Ouray. Travis could think of worse places to hide out from the world.

Carrie didn’t offer them anything to drink. Just led them across the entryway into the living room, sat in a chair facing the couch and left them to conclude that they should sit too. They did.

“This is Travis Chase,” Paige said. “And my name is Paige Campbell.”

Carrie nodded, politely if not quite kindly.

“I’m not coming back to Border Town,” she said. “So if that’s what you came to ask about—”

Paige cut her off, shaking her head. “We’re just looking for information. We need to know about an old Tangent investigation called Scalar. Do you remember it?”

As before, the woman showed no trace of surprise.

“I remember it to the extent I knew about it,” she said.

“Can you tell us what you know?”

“Why would you need me to? You’re with Tangent, you should have better sources than me.”

“We don’t,” Paige said. “The reasons would take a while to go into, and they wouldn’t brighten your day. Can you just tell us? I’m sorry to be this blunt, but it’s important. Something’s happening, and it relates to Scalar, and we need to know as much as we can.”

Carrie nodded, but only vaguely. Her hands, as fragile looking as the rest of her, moved nervously on her knees.

Travis studied her face. The stretched skin. The withdrawn eyes.

The voice alone was strong. Surprisingly so, for someone apparently ill.

He glanced at the end table next to the couch. Its base had shelves for magazines, all of them cluttered with old issues of Newsweek, National Geographic, and some local paper.

There was also a notepad with a pen clipped to it, its front page covered with phone numbers and random pieces of scribbled info. No doubt the pad had been there for as long as the cordless phone cradled atop the end table.

Travis indicated the pad and met Carrie’s eyes.

“Mind if I take notes?” he said.

She nodded again.

Travis took the pad, unclipped the pen, and turned to a fresh page. He began writing something immediately, though Carrie hadn’t spoken yet.

“Please start with the basics if you can,” Paige said. “What was the investigation about? What were we looking for?”

For a long time the older woman said nothing. Then her hands went still and she looked up at Paige.

“I’m sorry,” Carrie said. “Before I say anything, I need to hear whatever you know about Scalar.”

“I just told you,” Paige said. “We don’t know anything. Just the name.”

“Here’s the problem,” Carrie said. “There are at least a few people outside of Tangent who know that investigation by name only. People in the government—people in several governments. Those people were kept from knowing more than just the name, and for good reason. It’s not unthinkable that such parties, should they manage to find me here, would pretend to be with Tangent and ask me for information.”

Paige was already shaking her head. “Ma’am, I can assure you—”

“There has to be something else you know about Scalar,” Carrie said. “Some detail to prove you’re not an outsider.”

Travis turned the page he’d written on and began writing on the next. After only a few seconds he turned that one too, and continued on a third.

For a moment, pondering Carrie’s demand, Paige appeared lost. She pulled her bangs back from her forehead and stared into empty space in front of herself. Then she looked at Carrie.

“In the archives index in Border Town,” Paige said, “on Level B48, there are seventeen entries devoted to Scalar. The first is dated June 4, 1981. The last is dated November 28, 1987. All seventeen of them are lined out in blue ink. Is that good enough?”

Carrie looked impressed. But still undecided. She took a breath to speak, but before she could, Travis finished writing and set the pen aside. He turned the pages back until his first was on top, then calmly handed the pad across to Carrie. The move surprised her, but she took it and read the few lines Travis had written:

Nod if the real Carrie Holden is still in this cabin.

If you make a sound I will kill you.

By the time the woman looked up from the pad, Travis had drawn his SIG Sauer and leveled it at her face.

Chapter Eight

She didn’t make a sound.

Her hands began to shake again, and she lowered the notepad to her lap.

Travis was too focused on the woman to see Paige’s expression, but whatever her reaction was, it didn’t freeze her. Or lead her to a different conclusion from his. She drew her own weapon and aimed it at the woman.

Travis raised his eyebrows and pointed at the pad with his free hand, prompting her for an answer.

The woman swallowed and seemed to consider her options. She didn’t have any.

She nodded forcefully. Yes, the real Carrie Holden was still here.

Paige began speaking, her tone as casual as Travis had ever heard it. Anyone listening to an audio feed of this room—as someone undoubtedly was—would’ve heard no hint of tension. “If you need me to, I can put you in touch with other Tangent personnel to confirm we’re who we say we are. We need your information, Ms. Holden.”

Travis gestured for the woman to turn the page. She did.

How many are watching this place?

Nod if they are inside.

She thought about it. Raised a hand and extended all four fingers and her thumb. Then she shrugged and added the index finger of the other hand. Five, maybe six.

She also shook her head, slowly and deliberately. No, the watchers were not inside the cabin.

“Maybe you’ve guessed,” Paige said, “but the thing that’s going on right now is tied to Garner’s assassination last night. Which in turn is linked to Scalar. How, we don’t know.”

Nothing she was saying was especially sensitive—the people listening in almost certainly had that information already.

Travis gestured again: turn the page.

The woman complied.

Say you need to use the restroom.

Make no other sound.

Another swallow. A final moment of decision behind her eyes.

“I’m sorry, I need to use the powder room,” the woman said, and before the last word was out, Travis set his gun aside and lunged across the space between couch and chair. He got one hand over the woman’s mouth and nose before she could change her mind and scream, and looped the other arm around her neck, sliding right down onto the cushion beside her as he did it.

He left plenty of space between the crook of his elbow and her throat—he had no intention of strangling her. Instead he pressed his bicep to one side of her neck and his forearm to the other, in a sleeper hold—a blood choke, as they’d called it on the force in Minneapolis. Full compression of the carotid arteries on each side. You could kill someone if you weren’t careful with this move, though admittedly Travis wasn’t all that concerned for this subject.

She lasted seven seconds, then went limp against him.

On the possibility she was faking it, he took hold of her left index finger and pried it radically backward toward the top of her wrist, far beyond the ninety-degree limit it was built with.

She didn’t react.

She wasn’t faking.

He lowered her to the chair and stood. Paige, already on her feet, handed him back his gun. He holstered it, then crossed the room to the hallway and the half bath there, wide open and empty. He closed the door loudly for effect, then turned back to find Paige right beside him.

She leaned close and whispered against his ear. “They won’t buy this for long. We’ve got a couple minutes, tops.”

He nodded.

She drew back, then pressed in again. “I suspected, but I wasn’t sure. How’d you know?”

“She didn’t react to your last name. She should’ve, if she was close with your dad.”

“I thought the rock salt out front was overdone. Should’ve just been a path to the truck. Now we know why there was so much.”

Travis nodded again. Sometime last night a group of people had descended on this place. Maybe they’d parked on the road and come around behind the house to hide their footprints. Maybe the woman—the decoy—had rung the doorbell alone and gotten Carrie Holden to open up. Whatever had followed had been fast and brutal, and left lots of tracks going in. All of which had been erased by the salt.

Travis indicated the woman on the chair. “Find something to bind her with. I’ll find Carrie.”

Paige headed for an open closet near the entry. Even from here Travis could see random articles of clothing inside. Long-sleeved shirts whose arms would do fine as makeshift ropes.

He turned his attention farther down the back hall, past the bathroom. There were two doorways at the end, facing each other, both open. One room dark, one lit.

He hadn’t bothered to ask, in writing, whether Carrie Holden was still alive. Partly that was because he’d been in a hurry, but mostly it was because he’d assumed she was. Anyone who’d gone to this much trouble to set a trap for him and Paige must have a good reason to take them alive—it would’ve been far easier to open fire on the Jeep the moment they pulled in. Certainly that approach wouldn’t have required finding a passable lookalike. It followed that the aggressors would keep Carrie alive, too—the more Tangent prisoners, the merrier.

He advanced along the hall.

Dark room, lit room.

The decoy had been waiting in the lit one. She’d turned on the light when he rang the doorbell. It seemed likely that Carrie was in that same room: the impostor would want to keep an eye on her.

It occurred to Travis that the woman could’ve lied about the people watching this place: they could well be inside right now. They could be in either or both of the rooms ahead. In any such scenario he was outgunned. It almost wasn’t worth drawing his SIG. He drew it anyway. If someone was about to take him out, he might as well return the favor as best he could.

Behind him he heard Paige tying the woman’s wrists and ankles. The sound was vague, indistinct. To a listener it might have been someone shifting awkwardly in a seat.

Travis covered the last ten feet of the hallway at a fast walk, reached into the dark room to where the light switch had to be, and flipped it.

Home office. Big oak desk with a laptop and a green glass-shaded lamp and a scattering of papers. No closet. Nowhere for anyone to hide.

Travis spun in the hall and faced the other room. Carrie’s bedroom. Bigger than the office. Walk-in closet on the far wall, full of clothes and random boxes. No one hiding there, either. No one hiding anywhere, here. There was only Carrie Holden herself, bound and gagged with duct tape on the floor beside the bed, staring up at him with wide and alert eyes.

He holstered the gun and crossed to her, kneeling and putting a finger to his lips as he met her stare.

He removed the tape from her face first; it was triple wrapped but the overlap was sloppy, leaving the lowest layer exposed at the edge. Travis tore through it easily and pulled all three pieces aside. Carrie took a deeper breath than she’d probably taken in hours.

“Do you have a gun here?” Travis whispered.

Carrie nodded.

“Are you good with it?”

Another nod, accompanied by a look—mild annoyance at the question. Which boded well.

Travis considered what he’d seen of the cabin’s layout so far. One fact stood out: there was no back door. No easy way in or out but the entry he and Paige had used.

That was good.

He met Carrie’s stare again as he turned his attention to the rest of her binds.

“We can make it out of here alive,” he whispered, “but you have to do exactly what I say.”

As he freed her wrists he began to explain the plan.

Chapter Nine

Every instinct told Dominic something was wrong. The decoy’s decision to use the bathroom was entirely out of line. Granted, she wasn’t a professional at this kind of work—Dominic had no idea where his employers had found her, though without a doubt she’d come from somewhere within their own ranks. Probably high in the ranks. She was someone. Or someone’s sister or mother. They would’ve only chosen somebody whose loyalty was beyond question.

What wasn’t beyond question was her capability. Clearly she had no experience at being a stand-in. Who the hell did, aside from undercover cops and a few deep-cover intel people? It was pressure work of the worst kind. Contrary to what some believed, deception did not come naturally to most people. Even telling a small lie triggered all kinds of stress reactions, and this woman was telling a big one.

For all that, she’d done well at first. Right on script, as far as Dominic could tell. Her job was to get the visitors talking. Get them to disclose what they knew about Scalar—whatever the hell that was—in a setting where they felt comfortable enough to speak freely. Later on, after the team had taken them, there would be time to interrogate them at length, but that sort of questioning was chancy at best; Dominic knew that from long experience. You could torture someone for a computer password or a vault lock combination—information that could be confirmed on the spot—but you could rarely get at their deeper secrets. Broad, general information was hard to extract by brutal means. You couldn’t force the answers when you didn’t even have the questions.

Hence the decoy.

And she’d done fine until the bathroom thing.

Maybe her nerves had gotten to her. Maybe she’d needed a break to rein in the jitters and refocus. Splash some water on her face.

Maybe.

Offhand, Dominic could think of no other reason. If there was another reason, it was something bad. Something very fucking bad.

He spoke into the microphone that extended from his earpiece. “What are you seeing?”

The team leader near the cabin responded softly. “Nothing you’re not seeing.”

“I don’t like this,” Dominic said.

“Same. Standing by—for now.”

Travis finished whispering the plan as he got Carrie to her feet. She winced at the stiffness in her joints but looked steady enough.

Paige was standing in the doorway—Travis realized she’d been there for some time.

“Need me to repeat it?” he said.

She shook her head. “I heard.”

Travis guided Carrie into the hallway and the three of them returned to the living room.

Paige had done a thorough job on the decoy. She lay on the floor at the base of her chair, her wrists tied behind her with one arm of a cardigan, her ankles with the other. The sleeve of a wool sweater had been wedged between her teeth and tied around her head. There was some risk of her waking up and making noise—banging against the furniture if nothing else—but Travis wasn’t worried. One way or another, this would all be over in the next minute or two.

He wondered where the listening device was, but didn’t look for it. It could be anywhere. Under the couch. Tacked beneath the top of the end table.

He spoke at room volume: “She seems nervous, doesn’t she?”

“Probably just caught off guard,” Paige said. “It’s not every morning she gets a visit from Tangent.”

Travis moved silently across to the bathroom. He eased the door open, slipped inside and closed it gently behind him. Then he flushed the toilet, banged the lid down, and turned on the faucet.

Dominic relaxed a notch.

“You hearing this?” he said. The running water was just audible over the feed.

“Got it. Guess she just had to go. Jesus.”

A moment later the faucet shut off and the door clicked open.

“Sorry about that,” he heard the decoy say. Her tone sounded different—probably because of her distance from the microphone. “Please continue.”

The young female visitor spoke. “As I said before, Garner’s death has some connection to Scalar—”

The young woman stopped speaking. Dominic cupped his hand over the earpiece and listened carefully, but couldn’t hear anything happening—any reason for her to have cut herself off.

“What’s going on?” the team leader said.

“Quiet,” Dominic said.

For three more seconds the silence held.

Then the older woman spoke. “Is there a problem?”

Dominic’s stomach tightened. He thought he knew what was coming.

It came.

The young woman said, “You’re not Carrie Holden.”

Fuck.

The team leader spoke up, fast and tense: “Ready to move on my mark.”

“I beg your pardon?” the decoy said.

There was no reply from either the young woman or her male friend. Instead there came a burst of commotion. Furniture sliding. Bodies interacting. Voices raised and jumbled over one another. The male visitor said, “Get her legs!”

“Move now!” the team leader said. “Now, now, now!”

Two seconds after that Dominic saw the team sprinting into the pool of light in front of the cabin. All five of them, Heckler & Koch automatics in hand, rushing the front door in a tight group. Like a sledgehammer coming down on a knuckle.

Travis gave the end table a kick to create the last of the commotion, then turned and ran for the firing position he’d picked out moments earlier. Paige and Carrie had each already settled into theirs—Paige behind the corner at the hallway’s mouth, Carrie behind the iron woodstove. Carrie had retrieved her own pistol—a Beretta 92FS—during the long silence in the living room.

Travis reached his cover: an island in the kitchen. He dropped to a knee behind it, drew his SIG and leveled it on the door.

Already he could hear the footsteps outside, crunching hard on the exposed gravel. Seconds away.

Three protected shooting angles on a solitary chokepoint, against aggressors who didn’t even expect to come under fire—who expected to burst in on a scuffle among unprepared subjects.

Travis took a breath and steadied his hand on the granite.

The footsteps outside covered the last stretch to the door. Whoever was leading the pack didn’t stutter-step. He hit the lock at full speed and the latch-plate splintered from the frame and the door exploded inward.

Dominic didn’t really expect to hear shooting. The team would seek only to control the situation. At most they’d trigger a few three-round bursts into the ceiling for intimidation, though even that was unlikely. These men were professionals. They knew how to assert themselves without theatrics. And their orders were explicit: take the subjects alive. Gunfire of any kind would be an unnecessary risk.

Dominic’s own orders were in the same vein. His role was to disable the visitors’ vehicle if necessary—one shot to the engine block would do—but otherwise to withhold fire.

Only under the most implausible scenario, in which the visitors eluded the team and seemed likely to escape, was Dominic to engage them with lethal force.

It wouldn’t come to that. The decoy plan had failed pretty miserably—almost comically—but the rest would be warm butter on toast.

He was thinking that very thing when he heard the front door crash in—and right on top of that sound came the first gunshots. He flinched and tore out his earpiece, but not before recognizing what he was hearing: not the 9mm bursts the team would fire, but single shots of something heavier. Forty-caliber Smith and Wesson, it sounded like. And maybe a few 9mm shots among them, but not in three-round bursts. All the shots were sporadic but one at a time.

Then it was over.

Three seconds, start to finish.

In the silence he heard his pulse in his ears. And the wind sighing over the ridge into the valley, pushing the big snowflakes almost sideways.

He felt for his earpiece and put it back in place, but for the longest time he heard nothing.

Travis stood and surveyed the aftermath. His eyes picked out the relevant points in order of importance.

Paige and Carrie were unhurt.

All the bodies in the entry were down and still.

There was no one else coming in. No footsteps outside. No voices. Just empty darkness and blowing snow.

The decoy was still lying bound in front of the chair. Still unconscious. And unharmed.

The women stood from their cover. They met each other’s eyes, and Travis’s.

Travis crossed from the kitchen to the front door, his gun still trained on the bodies. He scrutinized them, saw that each had taken at least one headshot, and felt his tension step down a degree.

A second later it stepped back up.

Five bodies.

In his mind he saw the decoy extending five digits of one hand, then adding another finger with a shrug.

Five, maybe six.

If there was a sixth man, where was he? Why wasn’t he with the group?

Travis thought of the terrain surrounding the cabin, and the answer suggested itself. And made his skin prickle.

A lookout, up high. Almost certainly armed.

He saw earpieces on each of the corpses. He stooped and took the nearest one, and fixed it to his own ear.

“Are you listening?” he said. “Do you hear that? That’s the sound of none of your friends breathing.”

He waited.

No reply.

He hoped he was talking to dead air. But doubted it.

Dominic had already swiveled the mouthpiece behind his head so the man wouldn’t hear his breath. He kept the earpiece in place. He listened. Time drew out. It felt like the audio equivalent of a stare-down.

“Correction,” the man in the cabin said. “One of your friends is breathing. The nice old lady who lied to us. I guess it’s possible she’s not really your friend—but she’s somebody’s friend, isn’t she? I bet she matters to the people who hired you.”

Dominic felt his adrenaline begin to climb. He could see exactly where this was going.

“She has to be someone personally close to them,” the man said. “Who else would they trust to do this? I don’t think they found her on Craigslist.”

Fuck. Fuck.

“So here’s how this happens,” the man continued. “The three of us, plus your decoy, are leaving right now. In a tight group. You won’t have a shot that doesn’t risk hitting her. We’re going to stay tight all the way to the Jeep, and we’re going to sit tight inside the Jeep, and we’re going to keep it that way until we’re long gone. And if you try to kill the vehicle and strand us here, my first move is to put her brains in the snow. Try me if you think I’m bluffing.”

A hard plastic clatter ended the speech: the man had dropped the earpiece on the floor.

He wasn’t bluffing. Dominic was clear on that. Even if he’d thought it was a bluff, he couldn’t have taken the chance. He had no idea who the decoy really was—therefore risking her life wasn’t his decision.

It was someone else’s.

He reached into his parka and withdrew the blue cell phone. He double-pressed the send button and saw the display light up, the phone already dialing the man who’d called him last night.

First ring. No answer.

Far below, a broad shape emerged from the cabin. Four bodies clumped together. Three walking, one being carried. Even without looking through the Remington’s scope Dominic could see there was no shot. No single head was distinct—they were all shoved together in a silhouetted mass.

Second ring. No answer.

The group reached the Jeep and piled in and the engine roared. The headlights came on.

Third ring. No answer.

The vehicle backed around in a tight arc until it faced the road, then lunged forward, taking the turn fast and racing away down the valley toward town.

Fourth ring. No answer.

Dominic put his eye to the scope and centered the reticle on the Jeep. He did the math, the variables stacking up automatically in his head: range, velocity, elevation, time.

He could kill the vehicle easily right now. Once that was done he could put shot after shot into the passenger compartment, then sprint down to it and make a thorough finish.

That would hold true for maybe twenty seconds, given the Jeep’s speed. After that it would be more luck than skill.

Twenty seconds, if the call connected right now.

Twenty seconds to explain the situation and get a decision.

Nineteen seconds.

Fifth ring. A click on the line. A man’s voice: “Talk to me.”

Travis hated having the headlights on, making an easier target of the vehicle, but he had no choice. Under this cloudcover the valley would be ink black, and he couldn’t afford to lose the road. Burying the Jeep in snow would be fatal if there really was a sixth man back there.

A memory from childhood came to him: Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. Some point along this road represented the fabled bridge, the margin beyond which they would be safe.

He was certain they hadn’t reached it yet.

Paige was next to him in the passenger seat. Carrie sat centered behind them, leaning forward over the console. She had the decoy slumped across her lap, still bound, the Beretta pressed to her head in case she woke. Which she seemed to be doing—she was making noises.

How long since they’d pulled onto this road? Ten seconds? Fifteen?

Ahead lay the town, bright and welcoming beyond the darkness that engulfed the Jeep. They were ten seconds shy of the light when the first bullet hit. It struck the left edge of the hood with a sound like a baseball bat’s impact, but deflected without penetrating the metal. Travis felt the others flinch, and his hands jerked on the wheel, and for a terrible second the vehicle began to fishtail on the snowy road. The back end went left, the wheels spinning without purchase. A second shot skipped off the hard top three inches above Travis’s head. He felt cold air seethe down through the resulting rupture in the material. Then the Jeep straightened and surged forward again, and for the next three seconds nothing happened except that the town got closer and the darkness ahead of them got shorter. Three seconds for them to think they might make it.

Then the rear window shattered and a spring twanged inside a seatback, and blood splattered all over the windshield.

Chapter Ten

Not Paige.

Later, that would be the only thing Travis remembered thinking as the next seconds played out. Not the calculation of how far they had to go to reach safety, or how long that would take. Not the awareness that he needed to keep the Jeep under control. Not even the fear of another shot.

Not Paige. That was it. He could handle anyone else in the vehicle dying, himself included. Just not Paige.

If anybody was screaming, he couldn’t tell. His ears were ringing with increased bloodflow and the wind was keening through the hole above him, drawn by the pressure differential from the missing back window.

They passed into light on the east edge of town and the first available cross street came up fast. Travis braked and hauled right on the wheel, and halfway through the turn he saw a newspaper box on the streetcorner buffeted by a shot. The papers inside fluttered as if they’d caught a moment’s breeze. Then the Jeep was fully onto the side street and accelerating, with two-story brick buildings shielding it from the shooter.

The blood on the windshield was running down, each thick drop now a vertical line.

Travis turned to Paige.

Her left coat sleeve and the left side of her face were bloodier than the windshield.

But no more damaged than the windshield, either. It wasn’t her blood—a fact she seemed to be just verifying for herself. She turned in her seat and looked back at Carrie Holden.

Carrie wasn’t leaning forward over the console now. She was pressed against her own seatback, one hand to the lower left side of her abdomen.

Her fingers were soaked with blood.

“Jesus Christ,” Paige said. She repositioned herself so she was kneeling, facing Carrie; she switched on the dome light and bent down to study the wound.

Her first discovery was notable: the rifle bullet had clipped Carrie’s side—and fragmented in the decoy’s head. Most of which was now gone. As Travis looked more carefully at the blood on the windshield he saw that not all of it was blood. There was gray matter there. And a few chips of bone. He wondered if a death had ever mattered less to him.

He glanced back again and saw that Carrie had pulled up the bottom of her shirt to examine her own injury. It was all but superficial. The bullet had hit her so far to the side that it had almost missed—a quarter inch would’ve made the difference. The result was like a shallow knife slash to her side. Some bleeding, but no serious trauma. She let the shirt fall back over it and shoved the decoy’s body to the floor.

Travis glanced at Paige as she faced forward again. He saw her working out the pieces of what’d just happened.

“I guess it’s possible that whoever killed Garner could’ve found this place,” she said, “if they had the right connections. The government would’ve had no record of where you relocated to, Carrie, but they would’ve seen your name drop off Tangent’s personnel list in 1994. They’d know you were out there somewhere. In the past few years, facial geometry software could’ve probably narrowed DMV records to ten thousand or fewer. Narrow further by age and then look for a real-estate purchase or lease agreement in ninety-four, and they’d be in the ballpark. Wouldn’t take much legwork beyond that point. They might’ve found you five years ago and filed it away under useful.”

Carrie nodded. She looked emotionally drained, but still alert. “I used to be so careful about everything. Paranoid, even. After a while, it felt nice to think I didn’t have to be.”

Paige looked at Travis. “I think I was wrong earlier. The note they left for us—I don’t think they did expect us to understand it. Not in full, anyway. If they anticipated our showing up here, they must have known we’d be hard up for information about Scalar. They knew we’d come here to ask Carrie about it.”

“That makes the trap contradict itself,” Travis said. “Why set up a decoy to get information out of us, if we were only coming because we were clueless?”

He considered it for two seconds and then answered his own question.

“Confirmation. They believed we didn’t know anything, but they wanted to be certain. Like whatever it is they’re doing, they had to rule us out as a threat.”

Paige looked at him. “There’s no way they killed a president just to set all that up.”

“Not a chance. They’d need a bigger reason for that. This feels more like an afterthought.”

“Could the real reason involve putting Stuart Holt in power?” Paige said. “Maybe he’s involved. He’s the one who pointed the FBI toward us, ultimately leading us here.”

“It’s something to keep in mind,” Travis said.

They reached the end of the street and Travis took a left. Three blocks ahead lay Main Street, which was also Highway 550 running north out of town.

“I heard your introductions from the other room,” Carrie said. “Travis Chase. Paige Campbell.” A pause. “You’re Peter’s daughter.”

Paige looked back at her and nodded.

“I watched you grow up in photographs on his desk,” Carrie said. “You were fourteen when I left.” Again she paused. Then she said, “He’s dead, isn’t he? If he were alive, he wouldn’t have let you come here to ask me about Scalar.”

Paige nodded again.

Travis made the right onto 550. He could see the road extending ahead beyond the edge of Ouray, north into the darkness.

Then Carrie drew a hard breath with a shudder in it, and both Travis and Paige looked back at her. Travis had guessed the pain was getting worse, but she wasn’t wincing, and her hands were nowhere near the wound; they were relaxed on her knee.

The only thing tense was her face—with fear.

She looked at them both. “Is it really starting again? Everything Scalar was about?”

“Yes,” Travis said. “How much do you know about it?”

“Some. I know all about how it started. What led to it. Not much detail of the investigation itself. Peter was . . . hesitant to talk about it.”

“So I learned,” Paige said.

“Please tell us as much as you can,” Travis said. “Right now all we’ve got are questions.”

Carrie nodded. She sat there a moment putting her thoughts in order. When she spoke again, Travis could still hear the fear, though contained, subdued.

“The Scalar investigation was a cold case. It was cold even when Peter and the others started working on it in 1981. In a way, it was a manhunt, though they knew the man in question was already dead. Their goal was to learn about something he’d done just before he died—something that might have long-term consequences. The man’s name was Ruben Ward. I’m sure you’ve both heard of him.”

The name was instantly familiar to Travis, but he couldn’t place it. It was like trying to match an obscure actor’s name to a face or a role. He looked at Paige and saw no such struggle in her expression—she knew exactly who Ruben Ward was.

She glanced at him. “You read about him your first day in Border Town, in the journal down on Level 51.”

It came back to him before she’d even finished speaking. In the first hour Travis had spent in Border Town, more than three years earlier, Paige had given him a tour of the essentials. Which was to say she’d shown him the Breach. But first she’d taken him into a fortified bunker down the hall from it, and let him read a bloodstained notebook that dated to the Breach’s creation—March 1978.

That journal had been written by a man named David Bryce, a physicist and a founder of the Very Large Ion Collider project, which had once—very briefly after its completion—resided on the premises. Bryce had decided to keep an informal account of events at the VLIC: a journal that he and others could write in whenever they felt like it. The first entry had been jotted a few hours before the collider’s maiden test shot; Bryce’s tone had been lighthearted and hopeful. The same couldn’t be said for the rest of the entries.

The remainder of the journal chronicled not only the hellish first days after the Breach’s formation, but Bryce’s own descent into something like an animal mind-set, his cognitive functions and his inhibitions stripped away by exposure to the Breach—specifically the sounds that issued from it. Breach Voices, as they were now known.

The journal had also mentioned Ruben Ward, the man who had actually thrown the switch to initiate the VLIC’s first shot. The man who, in the strictest sense, had opened the Breach.

Ward had paid instantly for the privilege. According to the journal, he’d collapsed at the moment of the shot—possibly jolted by the switch or its metal housing—and never woke during the days that followed. Travis had heard a bit more about him afterward: Ward had been transferred to some hospital out east, still unresponsive, and ended up in a coma unit. That was as much as Travis knew. In all the time since he’d first heard the story, he’d never brought it up again. Neither had anyone else.

“I was under the impression he died at Johns Hopkins,” Paige said, “a couple months after the VLIC accident. April or May of 1978.”

“That’s what we told people,” Carrie said. “People who joined Tangent later on, after Scalar had come and gone. Kept them from asking unwanted questions.”

“So where did he really die?” Paige said.

“In a hotel room in Los Angeles, late that summer. August 12. He walked out of the coma unit at Johns Hopkins by himself in the first week of May, vanished off the grid for three months, then checked into a room on Sunset and put a .38 in his mouth. At the time we all thought we understood, more or less. Whatever the VLIC accident did to him must have left him scrambled. Maybe deep depression, maybe anxiety. He struggled with it that summer and then called it good, we figured. It wasn’t until a few years later that we found out we were wrong. Very wrong. At which point Peter launched the Scalar investigation to try to piece together those missing three months. He was desperate to find out where Ward had gone during that time, and what he’d done—desperate to learn anything about him, really.”

“Why desperate?” Travis said.

Carrie met his eyes in the mirror. “Because Ruben Ward knew what’s on the other side of the Breach.”

Chapter Eleven

Travis felt a chill crawl over his scalp. It had nothing to do with the air pouring through the bullet hole in the roof.

“How is that possible?” Paige said. “How could anyone know that?”

“I’ll tell you the parts I know,” Carrie said, “in the order they happened.” She went quiet again, thinking. “They took Ward to Johns Hopkins right after they got him out of the VLIC. He was unconscious for something like two weeks after that, and then he was in and out, never fully awake, but maybe halfway at times. He started talking a little, almost all of it incoherent. His wife was there with him—Nora, his only living relative. In one of his more lucid moments Ward asked her to write down everything he said, no matter how strange it sounded. So she did. She bought a notebook and jotted every word she heard him say. Later—a lot later—she would tell Peter that it seemed like science fiction. She thought Ward was drawing it from the books he’d read all his life. Crazy ramblings about a wormhole, alien technology, and something about a war. It was all absurd—but also consistent. Like a story.”

She paused for a few seconds and then went on. “At the same time, in those weeks at the hospital, there were guards outside Ward’s room at all hours. Federal officers of one kind or another. The accident at the VLIC was so sensitive, everything connected to it was under protective watch, including Ward. But whoever made that decision must’ve relaxed after enough time went by; the guards left on May 7, and late that night, after Nora went back to her hotel room, Ward extracted his own feeding tube and made his exit. Took the notebook with him, stole some orderly’s street clothes from a locker down the hall, and eventually found his way out.”

“Nobody tried to stop him?” Paige said. “After two months on his back he’d have been staggering like a drunk.”

“Once he was out of the coma unit, all he encountered were strangers,” Carrie said. “To them he probably looked like a physical-therapy patient. I know there were camera feeds the cops studied the next morning; they pieced it all together. From what I recall, it took Ward something like twenty minutes to get out of the building. He went out a north exit onto Monument Street and that was it. No one who knew him saw him alive again.”

They were two miles up 550 now. The last outposts of the town—a few motels and a campground strung out along the canyon—slid by, and then the terrain opened to flat emptiness bound by pasture fencing.

“Three months later, the suicide. I think the LAPD identified him by his prints; he’d been arrested at a couple war protests in college. Everything about the scene was straightforward. He checked in alone, killed himself, no sign of foul play. No sign of the notebook, either—not that anyone was even thinking about it by then. And my understanding of the story goes blank at that point, until June of 1981, when Nora remarried. Some of the wedding guests were old friends who’d known both her and Ruben, including former VLIC people who now belonged to Tangent. Peter Campbell was there too. He and Nora talked about Ruben—about how it wasn’t his fault what’d happened to him. He just wasn’t himself at the end. Nora reinforced that point by mentioning the notebook—all the sci-fi things he’d said in his stupor. Peter asked her to elaborate. What kind of sci-fi things, specifically? Nora rattled off what little she remembered, and as I’m told, Peter had to set down his drink to keep from spilling it. I suppose, technically, the investigation began at that moment, right there in that reception hall. Peter asked Nora if she could set aside a few hours the next morning, before leaving for her honeymoon, and speak to him at length about the notebook. I doubt she was thrilled at that idea, but she did it, and in those hours she managed to recall a little more, including a visual description of the notebook, for what it was worth: black cover, with the word Scalar in the bottom corner. The company that made it, I’m sure. Nora remembered that easily enough. It was the stuff inside the book she had trouble with. All she could summon by then were bits and pieces, which I’m sure were maddening for Peter to try to make sense of. In the end, though, those scraps were enough to give him a rough sketch of what had happened. Enough to scare the hell out of him.”

Far out across the open ground on either side of the highway, the yard lights of ranch houses glided past. Steep foothills rose beyond them, just discernible against the near-black sky.

“It all reduces to something like this,” Carrie said. “In the days after the accident at VLIC, when Ward was still in the bunker, he wasn’t entirely unconscious. He was aware of conversations around him—the fear and the tension down there. But there was something else he was aware of. Something he referred to as ‘tunnel voices.’ ”

“Breach Voices?” Paige said.

Carrie nodded. “Ward could hear them from inside the bunker, just like everyone else. But unlike everyone else, he could understand them.”

Paige had been staring forward at the snowfall in the headlights. Now she turned in her seat. Her eyes went back and forth between Carrie and Travis.

“Understand them?” Paige said.

Carrie nodded again. “They really are voices. And they’re saying something. A message that repeats every few minutes, endlessly.”

Paige shook her head. “We’ve analyzed the Breach Voices to death. Not with human ears, obviously, but microphones and every kind of pattern-recognition software. From the very beginning there were people who hoped those sounds contained a message, but the computers never turned up a thing.”

“Computers can’t decipher whale song either,” Carrie said, “but biologists are convinced it has meaning. In principle that meaning could be expressed in a human language if we had a translator.”

“You’re saying Ward was our translator for the Breach Voices?” Travis said. “That whatever knocked him unconscious gave him that ability? Wouldn’t that imply that someone on the other side wanted him to understand?”

“Peter believed that very thing after talking to Nora.”

Travis considered the idea. At a glance it seemed impossible: the Breach had been created by an accident of human origin, the VLIC’s first shot. A prepared message from the other side—bundled with some effect to grant a witness the means to understand it—didn’t fit that scenario at all. Had it been an accident? Or had the Breach always been intended to open? Had it been waiting for the human race—or any race out there in the great black yonder—to build the right kind of ion collider and switch it on? Why would someone on the other side have set things up that way? There would have to be a purpose for it—but what?

“How do we know Ward wasn’t just crazy?” Paige said. “Like everyone originally assumed?”

“There were things he said that craziness couldn’t account for. Rough descriptions of entities that didn’t even emerge until months after he was dead. He couldn’t have known about those things unless someone told him. Someone—or something—over there.”

“Christ,” Travis said.

“But that’s only a small part of the picture. There were bigger issues, though they were less clear, at least given what Peter could get from Nora.”

“Like what?” Paige said.

“There was a sense that the message contained general information about the place on the other side, though Nora had forgotten essentially all of it. Understandably, I guess—that stuff would’ve made the least sense in the first place. Like if I asked you to transcribe a few pages from a legal brief, and then quizzed you on them three years later.”

“You said there was something about a war,” Travis said. “Did she remember anything else about it?”

Carrie shook her head. “No details. Ward had spoken in detail about it, and Nora had written it all down, but none of it was still in her head in 1981.” She went quiet a moment. Then: “There was something else. Probably the most compelling part of the message. A step process of some kind—a set of instructions. But again, Nora had lost the specifics.”

The chill returned to Travis. It arced like electricity down his neck and along the skin of his arms.

“The Breach gave Ruben Ward instructions?” he said.

Carrie nodded. “He walked out of Johns Hopkins in May of 1978 with a set of orders literally in hand. Presumably he spent the next three months following them, and when he was done he put a bullet in his brain.”

Chapter Twelve

Nobody spoke for a long time. Travis watched the highway roll out of the darkness ahead. Snow and tire ruts and wind-scoured pavement.

“What could the instructions have been?” Paige said.

“That’s what Scalar was about,” Carrie said. “That question. Where did Ward go that summer? What did he do? What had he been told to do?”

“Did they make any headway on it?” Travis said.

“I really don’t know. I learned about the run-up like everyone else in Border Town, but once the investigation started Peter kept it tightly contained. Even the files in the archives were stored in secure cases. He and five or six others handled it all. Worked with the government to use their resources when necessary—probably things like law-enforcement databases, or even command of federal agents to follow up on leads. Once in a while we’d get a sense that there’d been some progress, but we never got the specifics. The only concrete thing I ever heard about the investigation was how it ended. Peter and the others flew somewhere—maybe D.C., but it could’ve been anywhere—to meet with a small group of very powerful people. From what little I heard they seemed to be a mixed bag: people way up in politics, intel, maybe even finance. The one detail I know is that Peter and the rest of his team prepared a report for these people before leaving Border Town. Some kind of summary of what Scalar had turned up, as well as a response plan. Like, Here’s what Ruben Ward did in 1978, and here’s what needs to be done about it. The rest of us called it the cheat sheet, because even though we never read it, we saw that it comprised just a single page.”

“Pretty concise plan, whatever it was,” Travis said.

“Important ones often are,” Carrie said. “And I had the feeling that whoever they met with agreed to it. Peter seemed relieved when he got back. He called us all together and said the investigation was over—Tangent’s role in it was, anyway. He said what mattered most now was simply forgetting about it. Said the subject was taboo.” She shrugged. “That was it. As far as we knew, the whole thing was settled for good.”

Travis thought of Paige’s encounter with Peter in her memory. The man’s fear that she’d mentioned Scalar to someone outside Border Town. That she might have triggered some unthinkable chain of events simply by doing so. Peter had harbored those fears just five years ago—two decades after shutting down the investigation. Whatever Scalar had uncovered, Travis was pretty certain it wasn’t settled for good.

“What exactly are we saying?” Paige said. “The moment the Breach opened it gave Ruben Ward instructions to do something, right? Something on behalf of whoever’s on the other side. They wanted him to do it. And he did. Then years later, my father learned about it—learned enough anyway, by the end of Scalar, to know Ward’s actions had to be countered.” She paused, thinking. “It’s like Ward set something in motion, and my father stopped it. Halted it, at least, got a lid on it—and spent the rest of his life terrified that the lid would come off. That means whatever this thing was, whatever Ward did, there’s no question it was something bad. Something very bad, with long-term consequences.”

“That’s about the only way to read it,” Carrie said. The fear had risen in her voice again.

Paige looked at her, then at Travis. “So whoever they are on the other side of the Breach,” she said, “they’re . . . malignant. They’re flat-out bad. That’s what we’re saying.”

Travis glanced at her. Saw her expression drawn tight, her own fear unmistakable. And something else—almost a sense of betrayal. He understood why. For as long as he’d known her, Paige had been the closest thing Tangent had to an optimist. She harbored no illusions that those on the other side of the Breach were especially good—there was no basis for believing that—but she’d long held onto the idea that they were at least ambivalent. That they’d never meant for their dangerous technology to come spilling into human hands. That they probably didn’t even know about the accident that’d tapped into one of their transit tunnels. The Breach was dangerous, but only in the way that earthquakes and hurricanes were dangerous. There was no intent behind any of it. Whoever they were over there, they weren’t trying to do us harm. That belief had shored up Paige’s world for a long time. Probably since the first day she’d set foot in Border Town.

The betrayed look flickered through her eyes for maybe a second, and then it was gone, vastly eclipsed by the fear that came with it. Her breathing accelerated and shallowed. For a moment she seemed overwhelmed, unsure how to respond.

Travis felt it too. No doubt Peter had felt the same, by the time he’d finished speaking to Nora. By the time he’d grasped even the basics:

Ward had done something for them.

Something he’d needed to keep secret.

Something he’d killed himself over, after the fact.

Maybe Ward had followed the instructions against his will, his mind as fried by the Breach Voices as David Bryce’s had been.

Travis tried to imagine Peter’s mind-set on that first day, in the summer of 1981—knowing that Ruben Ward’s work from three years before must still be playing out. That somewhere out there, at that moment, the dominoes were falling. Scalar had been a mad scramble to understand. To find the dominoes and stop them before the last one tipped.

Peter had stopped them.

So why was someone trying to set them falling again? One way or another, the people who’d killed Garner and laid the trap in Ouray were working against the end result of Scalar. Someone behind it all, pulling the strings, wanted to overturn the outcome. In all likelihood they’d already begun to do so.

“Whatever Peter did was in all of our best interests,” Travis said. “Who could possibly have the motive to undo it?”

The words hung in the air. No one had an answer. Snowflakes swirled in the headlights like stars broken free of the sky.

“We need details,” Paige said. “We need to know who my father met with in 1987. We need to find one of them, preferably one who still has a copy of the cheat sheet locked away somewhere.”

“It’d be a tall order getting your eyes on that document,” Carrie said. “It’s right up there with finding the original Scalar notebook, which Ward probably burned in a vacant lot before he killed himself.”

At the edge of his vision Travis saw Paige turn to him. He looked at her and didn’t have to ask what she was thinking.

“The Tap,” she said.

“Nora,” Travis said.

Chapter Thirteen

Even as hope flared in Paige’s eyes it guttered. On the one hand it’d be trivially easy for Nora to revisit the notebook in her memory—she’d written the damn thing; she could drop in and reread it at some point just before Ward disappeared. On the other hand, the Tap could kill her before it was even fully into her head. Forget whatever had happened to Gina Murphy; the pain and stress and increased pulse rate would be bad enough.

“If it worked, we’d know everything,” Paige said. “I just don’t have any confidence that it would.”

“Are you talking about an entity?” Carrie said.

Paige nodded, and explained the basics of the Tap in less than a minute—including the part about Gina. By the time Paige had finished, Carrie looked skeptical. Just like everyone who’d ever heard of the thing, before using it themselves.

“You can forget about Nora, in any case,” Carrie said at last. “She died of breast cancer in 1989.” A silence. Then: “What if I gave it a try? I was thirty years old in 1978, and living in New York. If this thing works the way you describe it, I could go back, take a drive to Baltimore, and get my hands on the notebook without much trouble.”

“The guards outside the room might be a problem,” Travis said. “Not to mention Nora herself.”

“I’m not talking about sneaking in. I could walk up and introduce myself as a colleague of Ruben’s. I wasn’t, but I was close enough. I’d certainly followed his work. I only ended up with Tangent because I swam in the same academic circles as people like him and Peter Campbell. I could wing it with Nora, easily. Go in and sit at the bedside, wait for some distraction and grab the book.”

Travis glanced at Carrie in the mirror.

“How’s your heart?” he said.

She shrugged with her eyebrows. “It’s not great. I’ve had a systolic murmur all my life. It’s louder in recent years, but that’s expected.”

“Sorry to be blunt,” Travis said, “but your age alone is an issue. I’m forty-four and I thought it was going to kill me when I used it.”

He didn’t add the rest of his thought—the part that was even more blunt: Carrie would have to think the Tap back out of her head once it was inside, a task she might not have the focus for in the middle of a fatal heart attack. What would happen if she died with it still inserted? Would the thing extract itself and revert to its cube shape, or would it just be stuck in there, useless forever? Carrie’s life was a lot to risk, but so was the Tap. As much as Travis hated the thing, there was no denying its usefulness.

“It’s an unnecessary risk anyway,” Travis said. “I have an idea. Let me think about it for a few minutes.”

For a while no one said anything more. The bullet hole whistled and the wind moaned at the open back window.

Paige looked at Carrie. “You can still come back to Border Town with us. Probably the safest place for you.”

Carrie thought about it, then shook her head. “If you don’t need me, I’d rather stay as far from Tangent as possible. I can take care of myself. In my less trusting days I hid stashes of money, and made a few useful contacts. Leave me the Jeep and I’ll be fine.” She was quiet a long moment, staring out the side window into the darkness. “I need to tell you one last thing, for what it’s worth. Something I overheard about a year after Scalar ended. I was heading toward the conference room, and I heard Peter inside, speaking to one of the others. They were alone. Something in their tone made me stop before going in, and before I could leave to give them privacy, I heard the end of the conversation. Peter said something like, ‘It’s clumsy as hell, the way we wrapped it up. If it goes bad now, it’ll happen fast. We won’t have much time to stop it.’ ‘How much time?’ the other man asked, and Peter said, ‘The first sign of trouble would be something big, and from that moment we’d have just about exactly twenty-four hours.’ I remember he paused for about ten seconds then, and when he spoke again he sounded more scared than I’d ever heard him. He said, ‘Yeah, twenty-four hours to the end of the road.’ ”

Travis glanced at Paige and then, in unison with her, looked at the Jeep’s console clock.

6:05 A.M.

Garner had been killed at a quarter to ten the night before, in the eastern time zone—7:45 here in mountain time. Therefore the end of the road—whatever that implied—would be 7:45 tonight. Thirteen hours and forty minutes from right now.

Paige called Border Town and arranged for a jet to meet them at a regional airstrip near Cimarron. No flight plan; the pilots radioed for clearance five minutes before arrival, on the likelihood that unfriendly elements were monitoring air traffic.

Carrie was gone with the Jeep by the time the plane landed. The aircraft was on the ground less than three minutes, and as it climbed above the clouds and the first hard beams of sunlight shone through the cabin, Paige said, “Tell me.”

Travis squinted in the glare. “In May of 1978 I was ten years old. Pretty big for my age. Stocky, probably four-nine.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“We know Ruben Ward leaves the hospital the night of May 7 by a north exit, carrying the notebook. We know the time to within a few hours. And we know he’s so weakened right then he can barely walk. Physically, between me and him it’s no contest. Snatch and run.”

“You lived in Minneapolis. How are you going to get halfway across the country by yourself at that age?”

“Steal my dad’s car and put the seat all the way forward. Minneapolis to Baltimore’s probably fifteen or sixteen hours if I obey the speed limit. Which I’d better, I guess.”

He watched her warm to the idea in spite of herself. But only to a point.

“You’ll have to make stops for gas,” she said, “and any station attendant is going to dial nine-one-one the minute you step out of the driver’s seat. That’s not to mention interference from other customers at the pumps. All of whom will be a lot older than ten, and not just emerging from a coma unit.”

“I won’t need gas stations at all. Five feet of plastic hose will do the trick.”

The biggest problem, Travis knew, would simply be other drivers on the road. Even at night he’d be visible at the wheel, at least in brightly lit areas like cities and busy stretches of the freeway. Though no one in 1978 would have a cell phone with which to call the cops, there was no question that people would take action at the sight of a kid driving a car. But after only a few seconds, Travis thought he had the answer to that problem too. He considered it a moment longer, felt certain of it, then pushed it away and turned to Paige.

“I’ve been trying to think of someone better suited to taking a shot at it,” Travis said, “but no one comes to mind. Outside Tangent, we might’ve trusted Carrie if we weren’t likely to kill her in the process. Or Garner, if he were alive—though I’d have worried about his age too. And inside Tangent there are—what—four people older than me?”

Paige nodded, her eyes suddenly far away as she consulted a mental roster of Border Town. Travis had already covered that ground in his own head. Tangent’s population was skewed pretty young these days, given the near total replacement of personnel three years earlier. The new recruits hadn’t come straight out of grad school, but nearly all of them were under forty. Academics with solid track records and sufficiently few ties to politics or industry, drawn from all the nations that’d jointly founded Tangent. Of the four people older than Travis, none were American. Two were just a year older and had grown up in France. Another was maybe three years older and Russian. The oldest, at fifty-one, would’ve been seventeen the night Ruben Ward made his escape from Johns Hopkins. Seventeen and living in a remote village in northern China.

Whatever resistance Paige had harbored for the idea was slipping fast. She looked at the time on her phone; she’d been doing that every few minutes since Carrie had spoken of the deadline. Travis had done the same. Even this flight back to Border Town, dead straight at five hundred fifty miles per hour, felt like a colossal hemorrhage of time.

“I can get to Baltimore,” Travis said. “I can get the book. It only costs us three minutes and sixteen seconds to try.”

“I guess your odds are better than mine,” Paige said. “I was negative two in 1978.”

They called Bethany and brought her up to speed, and by the time they’d landed, taken the Tap from the Primary Lab and returned to their residence on B16—at 8:25 in the morning—Bethany was waiting for them with all the useful information she’d unearthed. Which wasn’t a lot.

“Couldn’t nail down the exact timing of Ward’s exit,” she said. She adjusted her glasses, the same oversized pair she’d been wearing when Travis first met her last year in Atlanta. She looked young even for her age—could’ve passed for twenty without a hitch. When she really was twenty, she’d already been out of college and working for information-security firms, engineering the software that guarded the world’s secrets. In that field, the set of people on Earth with her skill level could’ve squeezed together into a good-sized elevator.

“I assume the Baltimore PD got involved,” Bethany said, “once the hospital realized Ward was missing, but any dispatch info from that time is long gone. The computerized records only go back to the late eighties. If there was more detailed paperwork filed, like a missing-persons report with witness statements, and maybe a description of the hospital’s camera feeds, I couldn’t find it. There might be a hard copy on a shelf somewhere, but there’s nothing I can read over broadband.”

“How about dated schematics of the hospital?” Paige said.

Bethany frowned. “I scored a hit on that one, but you’re not going to like it.”

She took a tablet computer from a big pocket on the side of her pants, switched it on and opened an image file. It was a huge high-resolution scan of a blueprint: an overhead view of part of the Johns Hopkins campus. She dragged it down so that only the top edge was visible: Monument Street running from Broadway to Wolfe—a distance of more than eight hundred feet.

“You’re going to stand outside the place on the north side and watch the exits there, right?” Bethany said. “Wait for Ruben Ward to come out?”

Travis nodded.

“The good news,” Bethany said, “is that you should be able to see them all at once. The north stretch was pretty much the same in 1978 as it is now: four separate exits onto Monument, all of them roughly visible from any point on the other side of the street. Given the coma unit’s location within the building, Ward could’ve used any one of the four just as easily as another.”

“Especially if he wandered at random for a while before he found one,” Travis said. “I won’t make any assumptions about where he might come out.”

“Well, see, that’s the bad news,” Bethany said. “You’re going to have to.”

She zoomed in until the middle third of the north stretch filled the screen. At that resolution, something became visible that hadn’t been before: a broad zone of Monument Street crossed out with diagonal lines. They extended right up onto the sidewalk to the building’s edge. All told, about fifty feet of the street’s length were marked out.

“What the hell is that?” Paige said.

“Construction. A service tunnel for the Baltimore Metro. The system didn’t go live until 1983, but they spent years building it before then. In the spring of seventy-eight they hadn’t yet started on the rail tunnel itself, the one that terminates at Broadway and Monument. Instead they were putting in a conduit for power and maintenance access four hundred feet east of that intersection, dead-centered on the hospital’s north side.” She dragged the image left and right and pointed out the exits Ward might use. “Two doors are west of the dig site, two are east. Whichever side you choose to wait on, you’re stuck with. I don’t think you’re going to get across the construction zone.”

“I might,” Travis said. “If it’s late at night, the work crew may have already gone home.”

“Can’t count on that,” Bethany said, “but even if they have, the dig itself is a major obstacle. This isn’t just some torn-up blacktop with plastic fencing stretched around it. I found an old Baltimore Sun article about the whole thing. The project ran from March to September of that year, and they installed the conduit thirty feet below street level. If they started in March, then the excavating would’ve been done by early May for sure. It’d be the Grand Canyon, cutting off the whole width of the street.”

“So if you guess wrong about which side he comes out on,” Paige said, “you’ll have to run around the block. How big is the one north of Monument? Is it square like the main hospital’s block, or is it shallower?”

“Normally, shallower,” Bethany said. “Madison Street is just a couple hundred feet north. But that’s dug up, too, so you’d have to go up to the next street, Ashland Avenue. I already did the math. No matter where you stand to watch for Ward, if you’re on the wrong side, you’ll have to run at least half a mile around. During which time he could wander off down a dozen possible alleys or even flag a cab—so what if he’d have to stiff the driver? He was desperate to get away from that place.”

Paige looked up from the computer at Travis. “I hope you were a fast ten-year-old.”

“Me too, because there’s no second shot at this. The memory’s burned whether I get the notebook or not.”

Chapter Fourteen

They planned what they could, as quickly as they could, devoting just under twenty minutes to it. They mapped the route—eleven hundred miles, about sixteen hours’ drive time with present speed limits.

“But not 1978 limits,” Travis said. “Fifty-five everywhere back then.”

“Even on the freeways?” Bethany said. She looked doubtful.

Travis nodded. “Sammy Hagar wasn’t kidding.”

He did the math in his head: at fifty-five the trip would take twenty hours.

Which was a problem.

Realistically, he’d have to steal the car late at night when both his parents were asleep. That would be well past midnight, probably closer to one or two. Twenty hours after two in the morning was ten the next night—in the central time zone. In Baltimore it would be an hour later. Factoring in stops for gas—which might take a while the way Travis was going to do it—could easily add another full hour. He’d be lucky to reach Johns Hopkins by midnight.

“Ward could already be gone by then,” Paige said. “All we know about the timing is that he leaves at some point after Nora does, and we don’t know when she leaves either. Could be nine o’clock the night of May 7—Sunday—or it could be three in the morning Monday. Getting there at midnight’s risky.”

“And I could be a lot later than that,” Travis said. “My dad might stay up until four instead of two. I might hit traffic jams.” He stared at Bethany’s computer, the highlighted route winding through seven states. “I’ll go a day earlier. Steal the car Friday night, get into town Saturday night.”

“You’ll have a lot of downtime in Baltimore,” Bethany said.

“Maybe I’ll head over to Camden Yards. Jesus, Ripken wasn’t even there yet.”

A minute later Travis was thinking about a different baseball player—one who’d done something newsworthy two days before Ruben Ward disappeared. Travis hadn’t remembered the event himself; it was just one of a dozen stories Bethany had pulled from a news archive to help him dial in on the date he needed. On his own he couldn’t recall a thing from within months of that day. Just random flashes of fifth grade, impossible to place in a timeline.

“The game happened on the Friday you’re shooting for,” Bethany said. “That’s May 5. The story would’ve been in Saturday’s paper, probably somewhere on the front page—even in Minneapolis. So you want to pinpoint Saturday and then rewind to Friday night before you drop fully into the memory.”

Travis nodded. He tried to focus on the news about the game. He’d been into baseball as much as any kid in the neighborhood, and would’ve definitely heard about this story when it happened. Almost certainly would’ve glanced at the headline sometime Saturday.

“If you had any real awareness of it at the time,” Paige said, “you’ll remember it when you’ve got the Tap in. Just picture the name in headline print. And that number.”

The Tap was sitting on the table in front of him. Staring at him, in its way.

No reason to wait any longer.

He snatched it up, pressed it against his temple and screwed his eyes shut. Already his pulse was accelerating, before the pain had even begun.

Ten seconds. Agony overwhelming all other feeling. The tendril snaking and darting across the top of his brain. Coiling, advancing, pressing.

Then it was fully in, and still. As the pain ebbed Travis became aware of Paige draped over his shoulders from behind, her cheek against his own.

He went to the couch and lay down. Paige and Bethany sank into chairs and watched him. Win or lose, the outcome was minutes away for them.

Travis closed his eyes. He heard Paige’s cell phone begin to ring just as the world dropped out from under him.

Formless dark. No body. No limbs. Thoughts and memories suspended in the void.

The name.

The number.

He’d barely begun to picture them when the image came up, clear and brilliant as a photo held in front of his face. It was a view of the dining-room table in his parents’ house. Yellow afternoon sunlight slanted in, swimming with dust motes. He saw it all from an oddly low angle, his eyes only a couple feet above the scattered mail at the table’s edge.

On top of the mail, like it’d been set there a minute before, lay a newspaper. Travis’s eyes went to a headline at the lower right corner, just peeking above the fold.

Rose hits 3,000.

The paper was dated Saturday, May 6, 1978.

Travis let the moment begin to slide backward in time. He watched the viewpoint drift away from the table, reversing along the path he must have just walked.

Out of the dining room. Down the hall toward his bedroom. The details were as strange as they were familiar—this was the old house. The little one they’d lived in before his parents’ illicit income sources began to blossom. The one place, at least in his childhood, that had really felt like a home to him. All at once he didn’t want to see its specifics.

He sped up the reverse until it was a blur, his viewpoint surging backward through a firehose stream of imagery he could hardly follow. Crazy bursts of walking movement that felt disturbingly like falling down a well. Jittery spells of holding still with his face over a magazine, or watching TV—he caught shutter-quick glimpses of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny and Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. There came a sudden rush of shower spray and soap and shampoo and then a split-second view of his own small face in a mirror, a toothbrush humming in and out of his mouth like a jigsaw blade. A glimpse of his pillow followed and then there was darkness, and the spooky tumble of dream visuals running backward through the night. These sights he could make no sense of at all—trees and fields and hallways and classrooms—and then he was awake again, propped up on his elbows in bed, staring at a book in the glow of his nightstand lamp. His hand flickered up and reverse-turned a page. Then again.

He slowed the memory stream down. All the way down. Froze it.

His field of view took in the book, the nightstand, and the alarm clock at the base of the lamp.

11:57 P.M.

Good enough.

Travis left the image still and waited. Two seconds passed. Three. Then, sensation. Not the soles of his feet but the entire front of his body: his legs and chest and elbows, all seeming to hover at static-spark distance above the bed.

He let himself drop.

The change was so jarring he flinched. On his previous use of the Tap he’d gone back only two years; his body had been indistinguishable from its forty-four-year-old state.

Ten was different—startlingly different—and his size and shape were the least of reasons.

The reasons were everything else.

His senses. The richness of the world came through them like a high. Had he really felt this way all through his childhood? This alive and feral? Had he lost it so gradually he’d never noticed it going away? He took a breath of the humidity coming in through the screen. He tasted cut grass and damp pavement and the pulp stock pages of the book lying open beneath him. A blue hardcover with no dust jacket. He flipped it shut. The Hardy Boys Number 2: The House on the Cliff. He set it beside the lamp and listened to the night. Crickets, katydids, distant tires hissing on asphalt. His hearing had to be half again better than what he was used to. His vision, too, though not in its clarity—at forty-four he still didn’t need glasses. It was more about the depth of colors. The saturation, maybe. Whatever it was, plastic lenses wouldn’t give it back to you once you’d outgrown it.

Beneath all the sensations lay something else, harder to name but more powerful. Some mix of hormones and oxygen-rich blood and uncluttered emotion. The simple, wild energy of being a child. It made him want to swing from the trees. If there’d been a drug to make a grown-up feel this way, it would’ve put to shame all the shit his parents were probably already selling in 1978.

He looked through his doorway into the room across the hall, and saw his brother Jeff asleep in the blue-white glow of his Captain Kirk night-light. Jeff was seven and already a certified Trekkie. Travis resisted the urge to wake him and tell him the movie version was coming out next year.

Further away was the sound of the TV in the living room, cranked down almost to silence for a commercial break. His father had done that all his life, even before he had a remote control. Now the floor creaked and the volume rose. Trumpets swelled and cut out, and then Johnny Carson was talking.

Travis killed the light, rolled onto his back, and lay waiting.

His father went to bed at 1:07.

Started snoring at 1:12.

Travis waited five more minutes, then got up and dressed.

He’d expected walking to feel strange in this body, but it was fine—the same unconscious act it’d always been.

He took his dad’s keys from their hook in the kitchen, pocketing them so they wouldn’t jingle. He opened the silverware drawer, slid aside the compartmentalized tray and found the envelope that’d lain beneath it all through his childhood. Inside was a quarter-inch stack of tens and twenties. He took them all, then returned to his bedroom and eased the window screen from its frame.

The car was a 1971 Impala, shit brown and already rusting around the wheel wells. Travis had actually driven it lots of times—as late as 1984 it’d been pretty reliable. It was parked on the street; there was no garage. He slipped in and racked the seat forward and got his foot on the gas without a problem.

He hit Kmart and bought everything he needed. Bread, chips, cookies, crackers, peanut butter, a twelve-pack of Pepsi. It all looked absurd in its ancient packaging. He got a coil of clear plastic tubing from the hardware department, and a five-gallon drum with a pouring spout. The last two things he bought were a wire coat hanger and a slotted-head screwdriver.

The checkout girl gave him a look when he walked up alone.

He nodded toward the parking lot. “Mom’s feet are killing her.”

The girl shrugged and started keying the prices by hand.

He found what he wanted in the fourth nightclub parking lot he searched: a Chevelle, maybe five years old, lime green with a white racing stripe down the middle.

And heavily tinted windows—including the windshield.

It took thirty seconds to defeat the door lock with the coat hanger, and another thirty with the screwdriver to break open the ignition and hotwire it. Ten minutes later he was heading east on I–94, the needle dead on 55 and the night air rushing in through the windows.

Chapter Fifteen

The Grand Canyon, cutting off the whole width of the street, just like Bethany had said. The hole was three stories deep and stretched from one foundation wall to the other: the hospital on the south side, a seamless row of academic and research buildings on the north. There were sectional concrete barriers along each side of the chasm, plastered with orange warning signs for those who didn’t grasp the concept of gravity.

Traffic on Monument had been blocked at the cross streets—Broadway to the west and Wolfe to the east. There was a sporadic stream of pedestrians going in and out of the hospital and the academic buildings, but otherwise the street was bare.

Which was going to make it hard to stand around without drawing attention, especially for a ten-year-old. Especially as the night drew on.

It was six o’clock Sunday evening. The air was chilly and the long sunlight filtered through trees on the sidewalk. Travis was sitting on a bench near Monument and Broadway, far west of the construction zone. He could see the hospital’s nearer two exits, but not the other pair. He’d have to be two hundred feet closer to the gap for that, and standing—there were no benches farther along than this one.

As it was he’d already begun drawing looks, just sitting with a comic book in his lap, though he’d only been here for ten minutes.

Drawing looks had been the story of his weekend. Within the first hour of daylight on Saturday he’d realized the Chevelle’s tinted windows weren’t giving him perfect cover. For one thing, they naturally drew the focus of passengers in other cars. People saw tinting and instinctively wanted to see past it. And in glaring sunlight, maybe they could. They were seeing something, it seemed, if only his silhouette. Whatever the case, in the span of ten minutes two different cars going by in the passing lane had braked and run parallel to him for over a mile, then dropped back and veered hard for the first available exit, each no doubt bound for a pay phone to dial 911. Travis responded by ditching the freeway and taking to the back roads, crawling east on county two-lanes from Chicago to Cleveland before deciding he’d had enough. He hit another Kmart, bought a blanket to conceal himself in the backseat, and slept until nightfall.

Everything was easier in the dark. Even siphoning gas. All you needed was a big parking lot with a few cars clustered out near the edge. Duck out of sight among them, and the rest was simple.

He’d rolled into Baltimore this morning, half an hour past dawn, left the car at a meter three blocks west of the hospital—the closest space he could find—and set out on foot.

For much of the day he’d avoided attention easily enough. The trick was to move with purpose. If he stood still anywhere for even a minute, people stared. They saw him, looked around for a nearby parent, and failing to spot one approached him to ask if he was lost. But moving around had been easy, early on. Upon arriving he headed for Monument Street and checked out the dig site, then went into the hospital by the entry just west of the excavation. Though Bethany’s schematics had suggested otherwise, he’d held on to some hope that the building itself might provide a shortcut. A way to dart in on one side of the canyon and back out on the other, on the precise half chance that Ward would emerge where Travis didn’t want him to.

He saw right away that it was no good. All the north entrances opened at the ends of long, separate wings running up from central areas of the complex, and though there was a main east-west corridor tying them together deep inside the old building, the whole idea of cutting through this place in pursuit of Ward felt risky. It was understandable that Ward himself, shuffling along in street clothes, could make it past the staff without being stopped. A ten-year-old sprinting hell-bent through the corridors would be a different story.

For good measure Travis went up to the coma unit, on the fourth floor and dead centered in the hospital’s footprint. It was easy to see how Ward would get away unseen by the nurses: the nearest station was down the hall and around a corner from his room, and in the opposite direction was a bank of elevators. Travis spotted Ward’s room easily; it was the one with two guys in crew cuts and black suits flanking the door.

He walked by and tried to look casual while stealing a glance inside. Ward was right there, occupying the room’s only bed. His head was shaved smooth as Travis had expected, given the likelihood of EEG testing.

Nora was seated beside him. A beautiful woman with haunted features. She’d look worse by this time tomorrow, and stay that way for at least the next three months. Probably a lot longer.

The last thing Travis’s eyes picked out was the notebook. It lay on the deep windowsill behind Nora’s chair, a pen stuck into its spiral binding. Its black card-stock cover was already worn by weeks of use, and the word Scalar was just visible at the lower right corner. Travis had all of half a second to stare at it, and then he was past the door frame and moving on.

Now, some twelve hours later, he sat on the bench on the west end of Monument, trying to avoid the increasingly frequent stares. He turned a page of the comic book, for appearances. Star Wars #10: The Behemoth from Below. On the cover, Han and Chewie were blasting away at a giant green lizard. Travis wondered what a mint copy would be worth thirty-four years from now. Probably about five bucks. Not that he could bring it back with him anyway.

Neither could he bring back Ward’s notebook if he got his hands on it. The plan was simply to hole up somewhere and read the damn thing a hundred times. Read it until he could shut his eyes and recite it word for word. Then he’d snap out of the memory and transcribe the whole thing. Paige had already set up a laptop on the dining room table, the cursor ready and blinking in Microsoft Word.

Travis looked up at the hospital again. He watched people come and go from the two exits he could see.

The lack of a shortcut was trouble, but not disaster.

The lack of a stakeout position was.

It was the one problem he and Paige and Bethany hadn’t been able to plan around. No way to know exactly what he’d find on the north side of Monument Street, in terms of hiding places. In his most optimistic scenario there’d been a Dumpster sticking out of an alley, full to the brim with trash he could hide in and stare out through. No luck there—no Dumpsters or alleys along the north side of the street. Nothing but the unbroken row of buildings.

Travis had seen all of that this morning, then spent the day wandering the city trying to think his way through the problem. As an adult he could’ve solved it any number of ways. Buy a cheap harmonica and a little wooden box and stand there on the sidewalk busking. Wouldn’t matter that he sucked at playing harmonica—it would help push attention away from him, in fact. People would consciously not look.

But even the busking would’ve been unnecessary. A grown man could just walk up and down Monument, from the dig site to either intersection, back and forth all night long. Hours and hours, the same circuit, four hundred feet east and four hundred feet west. If anyone noticed the repetition and found it strange, would they even consider asking him about it? Not likely. People tended to see strangeness as trouble, which in turn they tended to avoid.

But none of those options existed for a ten-year-old.

Shit.

He turned another page of the comic book. Let his eyes drift over the images and words without processing them.

A shadow fell across his lap.

“Excuse me.”

Travis looked up and saw a woman in her thirties, a five-year-old girl in tow. The girl stared at Travis with big eyes and tried to hide behind her mother’s leg.

“Do you need help?” the woman said.

Travis offered a quick smile and shook his head. “I’m good. Thanks.”

Another trick—when you weren’t moving with purpose—was to be direct and certain. Let no ambiguity into your words or your tone.

He turned his eyes back to the comic book and ignored the woman.

The shadow stayed put.

“You’ve been alone here the whole time I’ve been waiting for the bus,” the woman said. “If you need to call someone, I have change. And we can wait here with you if you like—”

“Really, I’m fine,” Travis said, looking up at her again. “My dad always meets me here at six-fifteen sharp. He says it’s a safe spot ’cause it’s busy. I’m just early, that’s all.”

The woman frowned. Looked like she wanted to wait anyway, if only to have a word with his father about this arrangement.

“Seriously,” Travis said, “don’t miss your bus. I’d feel terrible.”

Another frown. The woman started to say something else, but didn’t. The little girl tugged on her hand, gesturing with her whole body back toward Broadway.

The woman exhaled deeply. “I don’t like it,” she said, and then she was gone, back to the knot of people at the intersection.

Her bus came two minutes later, and when it’d left, Travis stood and stuffed the comic book into his pocket. He stood there thinking, getting the mental equivalent of a test pattern. It could be nine hours before Ward staggered out of the hospital, and Travis couldn’t imagine how to stand watch for even thirty minutes.

He wandered toward the construction zone. The crew was still at it. From beyond the waist-high barrier and far below came the shouting of men and the rattle of air-driven tools. There was a stereo blasting Bob Seger’s “Hollywood Nights.” The glow of halogen worklamps shone upward onto the inside face of the far barrier, just beginning to compete with the dying sunlight.

Absent a Dumpster, the closest Travis had come to a plan had been a vague thought of hiding within the site itself. Slip over the barrier and stand on the edge of the chasm, and hope to find some kind of material scraps with which to conceal himself. Three or four wooden planks might’ve done—stand against a foundation wall on the north side of the street and lean the wood around himself in a jumble. In darkness it would’ve been hard for anyone to see him among the boards, and maybe he could’ve arranged them to create viewing angles on all four exits.

But there were no scraps of wood or anything else, and with the workers still on the job it was a moot point.

Travis stopped fifty feet shy of the concrete blockade. “Hollywood Nights” finished and “Still the Same” kicked in.

Travis ran his hands through his hair. How much longer could he loiter out here before somebody waved down a cop?

That thought had hardly formed when another shadow slid into view, paralleling his own as it stretched away down the pavement. Footsteps scuffed to a stop behind him, and a man softly cleared his throat.

Travis turned, half expecting a cop already.

Instead it was a guy in a dress shirt and khakis, fortyish and visibly awkward.

“Hey there,” the man said. The voice was gentle. He might have been addressing a stray kitten. Behind him there was nothing but wide-open street all the way back to the intersection. This guy had come a long way to say hello.

When Travis didn’t answer, the man stepped closer. Ten feet away now. “You look a bit lost. I couldn’t help noticing. I live right back there.” He nodded absently behind him, toward the block immediately beyond Broadway.

Travis shook his head and looked down at the roadbed, suddenly unable to stand the guy’s nervous expression.

“Just waiting for my dad,” Travis said. “I’m fine.”

The man advanced again. “You don’t look like you’re waiting. I saw you on the bench, and now you’re standing around down here. How would your dad find you if you’re all over the place?”

The voice was still soft, but under the awkwardness there was an edge of excitement.

“You need a place to sleep tonight?”

Jesus Christ. So there were two problems he and Paige and Bethany hadn’t planned around. He pictured them laughing their asses off when he told them about this one.

Another step. The man was close enough to touch him now, and when he spoke again he was almost whispering. “Nothing has to happen. Nothing you don’t want. I promise.”

Travis was still looking down. He fixed his eyes in the deadest glare prison had taught him, and raised them.

The man stepped back as if shoved.

“You better get the fuck out of here,” Travis said.

The guy nodded quickly and didn’t say another word. A second later he was gone, walking away down Monument at just less than a jog. He’d gone thirty yards when a fragment of his pick-up spiel came back to Travis.

I couldn’t help noticing. I live right back there.

Travis looked past the intersection of Monument and Broadway. The next stretch of Monument, west of Johns Hopkins, had a parking garage filling most of the south side and a row of town houses on the north. No doubt most of them had been converted to multiple units.

Any one of which would offer a perfect viewing angle on all four of the hospital’s north exits.

“Mister!” Travis yelled.

Chapter Sixteen

He introduced himself as Garret and led Travis up to his place on the third floor, four units west of Broadway. Garret’s every move was nervous and excited. He had a high, quick laugh with which he interrupted himself in almost every sentence.

He opened the door to his apartment and ushered Travis directly into the living room. The air smelled like a mix of candlewax and macaroni. Travis hardly noticed. His full attention had gone at once to the bay window overlooking Monument. Through the 45-degree pane on the left, facing Johns Hopkins, he would have a better vantage point than he could’ve dreamed of.

There would be a delay issue, of course. He’d be fifteen seconds getting down to the sidewalk from this place, and another ten or more sprinting to the intersection. But that was fine. He’d have plenty of time to catch Ward if he emerged from one of the nearer two exits, and if he came out beyond the Grand Canyon, well, that was always going to be a pain in the ass. Even starting at a Dumpster right across from the hospital, Travis would’ve been forced to backtrack a couple hundred feet before heading north on Broadway to circle the block. Garret’s bay window was as good a starting point as he could’ve hoped for.

Travis took in the living room’s details. The coffee table was littered with magazines and beer cans and used paper plates and three heavy ceramic mugs. Travis crossed to the room’s midpoint and came to a stop with his shin at the coffee table’s edge. He heard Garret stop a foot behind him. Felt him standing there, holding his breath.

Travis turned around and looked up into his eyes. Garret returned the stare, then glanced at the top of his head. Travis knew his hair was matted from sleeping in the car yesterday—he hadn’t been able to fix it since then.

“You can take a shower if you like,” Garret said. “Or I’ve got bubble-bath soap, if that’s better. It’s an oversized tub, if . . . you know . . .”

He left the sentence unfinished.

Travis didn’t respond. He waited until Garret was looking him in the eyes again, and then darted his own gaze just past the man’s shoulder and flinched hard.

It never failed. Few people could help but react to the sudden, primal belief that something dangerous was right behind them. Garret pivoted, and in the same instant Travis scooped one of the mugs from the coffee table and swung it as hard as he could into the back of the man’s head. It would’ve been bad enough for Garret even if the mug had broken, but it didn’t. All of the force of the impact went into his skull instead. He made a grunting sound—“Uhnn!”—and crumpled and then sprawled. Travis dropped onto him and arced the mug down on his head three more times, putting all his weight into each swing, then scrambled backward away from him. He held the mug ready and watched the man.

Garret didn’t move.

After a moment Travis heard him breathing, slow and ragged. Travis stood and circled wide around him. He went to the closet by the entry door and found a roll of duct tape, came back and used a third of it binding Garret’s limbs and covering his mouth.

It was 10:30. Monument Street lay in pools of sodium light and the apartment was pitch black away from the windows. Travis had stood watch for over four hours. Realistically it would be hours more before Ward would likely appear, but there was no reason to look away. Garret had stirred and moaned a few times in the darkness, but had mostly remained unconscious. In the minutes after binding him, Travis had made a quick survey of the apartment. Mainly he’d hoped to find a pair of binoculars. No luck. He found a stack of photos showing Garret rock climbing with a woman, presumably his girlfriend. She was taller than Garret and built like a pretty serious weight lifter. Travis thought a psychologist could make a whole career out of the guy’s libido.

He also found a loaded snub .38 in the nightstand drawer. He left it there. Couldn’t imagine having a use for it in the coming hours.

Foot traffic on Monument north of Johns Hopkins had dropped to practically nothing at nightfall. No one was coming or going from the academic buildings on the north side of the street, and only a few left or entered the hospital—at least from these four exits.

Binoculars would’ve helped with the more distant pair of doors. They were between seven and eight hundred feet away, about the limit of Travis’s ability to tell bald from blond. He hoped Ward’s posture and movement would simply make it obvious. Hoped he’d see him and have not the slightest doubt who it was. The nightmare possibility—clawing at Travis all these dark hours like some animal inside his chest—was someone emerging beyond the construction zone who only might be Ruben Ward. Anyone bald and stooped would fit the bill, and there had to be all kinds of men like that inside the place. If one stepped out, there’d be no time at all to make a decision. Travis would just have to run. Half a mile around the block, as fast as he could move. And if he got there and found some arthritic sixty-year-old, he’d have to make the same sprint right back here, hoping like hell he hadn’t missed Ward in all the lost minutes.

He tried not to think about it.

He watched the street.

He waited.

Ruben Ward stepped out of the nearest of the four exits at seven minutes past midnight. So close Travis could see the black notebook under his arm. Travis watched the man just long enough—maybe three seconds—to be alarmed at how quickly he was moving. Ward staggered, but not slowly. More like a drunk perpetually chasing his balance. He made three lurching steps along the sidewalk, braced a hand against the building, then withdrew it and lurched forward again. Fast. Way the hell too fast. Between lurches and pauses he probably matched the speed of a healthy person walking.

Travis turned and sprinted for the apartment’s entry, vaulting over Garret as he went.

He was almost to the door when he heard a key plunge into the lock from the other side.

Chapter Seventeen

It didn’t happen like it would’ve in a movie. There was no drawn-out moment in which the lock disengaged and the knob made a hellishly slow turn.

It happened in half a second, start to finish: click-turn-shove.

Travis checked his momentum just in time to keep from catching the door with his nose, and just like that he was face to face with the woman from the pictures. The rock climber. Taller and stronger than Garret.

She startled and fell back a step, dropping a bag of groceries she’d been holding. Something shattered. Something rolled.

The woman was wearing a uniform of some sort. In the split-second he had to think about it, Travis guessed she was a stewardess. Or a car rental clerk. Or one of a thousand other things.

Her panic disappeared in the next second—probably the time it took to realize she was staring at a ten-year-old—and anger took its place. She came forward, kicking aside the fallen groceries, and swatted the light switch upward.

Travis squinted, not quite blinded but sure as hell stung by the sudden brightness.

“What the fuck is this?” the woman said. Her volume suggested she wasn’t just talking to Travis. She wanted an answer from Garret, wherever he was.

Travis drew back from her advance, realizing even as he did so that he was clearing the way for her to see Garret.

She saw.

For the second time in as many breaths she flinched and recoiled. Her eyes registered the purest bafflement, and then regardless of the conclusion she’d drawn—if any—she simply reacted. She lunged at Travis, shoving the door fully aside as she came on.

There was no chance of getting past her and onto the landing. Even if he did, he wouldn’t get away. She’d be faster than him. Much faster.

Travis staggered back and hit the coffee table with his calves. He lost his balance and went down hard in front of the couch, the woman already descending on him, getting a fistful of his shirt. Half of Travis’s attention was on her, and the other half, like a mental split screen, was on Ruben Ward. Lurching and bracing. Lurching and bracing. Probably halfway to the intersection by now. Once he reached it, there was no telling which direction he’d go, but in any direction there were places he could duck into within the next hundred feet. Which he might well do, out of fear that hospital staffers were right behind him—he’d have no way to know they weren’t.

Ward could reach concealment in the next thirty or forty seconds. Could be gone in the next thirty or forty seconds.

Travis became aware of the woman screaming at him. Asking who he was. Grabbing for both of his arms and trying to pin them. She got one. Went for the other. Travis yanked it away and did the only thing he could think of: put his index and middle finger together into a fused, rigid spike, and stabbed her in the eye with it.

She cried out and let go of his other arm, both of her hands flying to her face to feel for damage.

Travis twisted beneath her, got hold of one of the couch’s legs and pulled himself free. He heard her cursing and shouting and felt a rush of air as her hand just missed his back.

Then he was on his feet, bounding over the coffee table and toward the doorway.

The bedroom doorway.

Behind him he heard the woman’s tone change from anger to fear. Maybe she understood what he had in mind. The table clattered as she shoved it away and came after him.

The doorway was just ahead now. He hooked the frame with one hand as he went through, swinging his body like a sideways pendulum toward the nightstand. He got his free hand on the drawer pull just as the woman crashed into him from behind.

The drawer came fully free of its seat. Its contents flew. Reading glasses. A little box of tissue. The snub .38. Travis’s hand closed around its grip as he went down, and then he tumbled, knees and elbows hitting the floor in random sequence.

He came to rest with his shoulder blades against the far wall, the pistol in his hand and leveled back toward the direction he’d come from. Toward the woman.

She pulled up short six feet away, frozen on all fours like a cat in the last instant before pouncing.

Her eyes were locked onto the pistol’s barrel.

“Take it easy,” she said.

“It’s only a memory,” Travis said, and pulled the trigger.

The bullet shattered her collarbone and she collapsed, screaming and holding the wound. Travis was already up and sprinting, ignoring her, going right over her and through the doorway.

Across the living room. Through the still-open entry door and onto the landing. He was two flights down before he realized he still had the gun. He stuffed it into his front pocket coming off the final step, hit the exterior door’s latch bar and burst out into the cool night.

He faced the intersection, and the north stretch of Johns Hopkins beyond it.

No sign of Ward at either one.

The man was already out of sight. He’d reached the crossroads and made a turn, one direction or another.

Travis broke into a sprint toward Broadway. He dissected the situation as he ran. Ward couldn’t have crossed Broadway and continued along Monument—Travis would’ve seen him already in that case. He also couldn’t have gone into the parking structure; there was no entry to it anywhere near this street corner. That left north or south on Broadway, and south would keep Ward right next to the hospital for another eight hundred feet. The place he was desperate to get away from.

North, then. Had to be.

Travis was already looking in that direction as he passed the last townhouse. The whole width of Broadway slid into his view.

Ward was nowhere on it.

Travis spun to look south. No Ward there, either.

He faced north again. Looked for places the man could’ve ducked into. Only two were close enough to be plausible options: an alley behind the row of academic buildings to the east, and another behind the row of town houses to the west.

Something metal crashed onto concrete. Maybe a trash-can lid. Definitely in one of the alleys—but which? The acoustics were tricky.

Travis sprinted again, covering the hundred feet north to the midpoint of the shallow block. Faced the left-side alley—behind the town houses—as he stopped hard.

The lid lay thirty feet away in the spill of amber light from the street. Five feet beyond it there was only darkness: a channel of fractured and cluttered space that separated the town houses on the south half of the block from those on the north. It stretched all the way to the west end, almost three hundred yards.

But there were lots of ways out of it, north and south. Mini-alleys that divided parallel homes here and there. Travis could see these only by the gaps in the rooflines three stories up. Down in the dark at ground level there was no detail at all. Ward could be slipping into one of these passageways right in front of him, right now, and he wouldn’t know. Travis threw himself forward into the channel.

Deep shadow. Random shit strewn everywhere. Hazy light from the occasional back room.

Travis found his eyes adjusting after the first ten seconds. Saw a child’s wagon and stepped over it quietly.

Something moved in the dimness fifty feet away. A clatter of wood and concrete and—what else? Human hands striking the ground, Travis thought.

A man cursed softly.

Travis advanced. One careful step at a time.

Faint sounds of movement ahead. Junk being shoved aside. Plastic bags rustling. Ward was struggling to get back on his feet.

Travis tried to fix his eyes on the sound source. No good. At any distance the darkness was still nearly perfect.

He took another slow step—and crushed an aluminum can that’d been lying on its side. In the stillness the sound might as well have been a car alarm.

A man’s voice called out, raspy and sore and full of fear: “Who’s there?”

Travis didn’t answer. He waited. Took soundless breaths with his mouth wide open.

Five seconds passed, and then the rustling noise came again. Ward was still trying to get up.

Was it really that difficult for him to do? That was hard to believe, given the agility he’d shown so far.

Bags slid on the alley floor. Something made of plastic flipped over and skittered.

Suddenly Travis understood.

These weren’t the sounds of a man laboring to right himself.

They were the sounds of a man searching for something.

Ward had lost the notebook when he’d fallen.

Travis advanced again, still trying for silence but not as carefully as before. His right hand went to his pocket and settled on the .38.

He was forty feet from the sifting sounds now, still trying to peg the location. The brick walls on either side played hell with his directional hearing.

Travis was keenly aware of the situation’s risk: Ward knew now that someone was here hunting him. The instant the man recovered the notebook, he’d go silent again, and the advantage would be all his. He could pick any narrow alley at random and disappear.

Travis continued forward. Thirty feet away.

The rustling stopped.

So did Travis.

He froze and held his breath and listened for movement.

Instead there came a shout: “Leave me alone!”

It echoed crazily along the rift between the townhouses, in staggered and distinct reverberations.

But Travis’s ears picked up something else. Some other sound, barely audible beneath the panicked words. He thought he knew what it was, though it made no sense: a zipper being undone.

What zipper could Ward have except the fly on his jeans? Had his pants snagged on something when he’d sprawled? Was he sliding out of them so he could get away?

The echoes of the shout faded and the alley dropped to absolute silence.

Five seconds.

Ten.

Travis felt panic begin to stir. Ward was leaving, and there was no way to stop him.

Fifteen seconds.

Not a sound anywhere.

Travis let go of the gun in his pocket, cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted.

“Ruben! I know about the VLIC! I know about the instructions!”

A foot scraped on concrete, maybe stopping fast and turning, far away in the dark. Fifty or sixty feet.

Silence.

“I’m supposed to help you!” Travis said.

For a moment nothing happened. Then Ward called out: “Who the hell are you?”

Travis thought about his reply. Saw no reason to be inventive.

“Travis Chase! Let me help!”

He heard a fast exhalation. It sounded like confusion, though it was hard to tell. More likely it was just a physical response to the past minute’s stress.

“You’re only a kid!” Ward yelled.

Travis started moving again. Homing in on the voice’s location: not just far ahead but all the way against the alley’s left side.

“I’m old enough to be useful,” Travis said, letting his own voice relax.

“The instructions didn’t say anything about this,” Ward said. Still unnerved. Still on the brink of fleeing.

“What, there’s a rule against someone giving you a hand?”

The points of the conversation didn’t matter. Keeping Ward talking mattered. And closing in on his voice.

But the seconds drew out, and Ward didn’t reply.

Travis continued moving forward. Slowly. Silently.

Then the man said, “Is it already happening?”

Travis started to ask what he meant, but stopped. Asking for clarification might clash with what he’d told Ward a moment earlier: that he knew what was going on. While Travis didn’t need to make sense, he did need to avoid scaring the guy away.

“The filter,” Ward said. “Is it starting now?”

The filter?

Travis hesitated, still advancing, then decided to wing it. “It’s possible,” he said.

Ward breathed out audibly again. Same location: ahead and to the left.

“It’s not supposed to happen yet,” Ward said. “Not for years and years.”

Travis kept moving. Forty feet to go. He’d have to speak more softly now to hide the fact that he was getting closer.

“Whoever it affects,” Ward said, “it’s not their fault. Not really. Under the wrong conditions, anyone could end up the worst person on Earth.”

Travis’s leading foot touched down and froze. So did the rest of his body.

Are you wondering if there’s a connection? Paige had said. Between whatever’s going on right now and . . . the thing about you?

Travis stared at the blackness where Ward had just spoken, and found his thoughts suddenly vacant. The question came out before he realized he was asking it: “What are you talking about?”

He noticed only halfway through—too late for it to matter—that he hadn’t tempered his voice at all.

There was another quick scuff of shoes on asphalt—Ward flinching, maybe—and then a sustained burst of movement as the man took off running through the cluttered dark. Crashing past whatever lay in his path. Stumbling and staggering, but moving fast.

Travis pushed away the confusion and sprinted after him. Following the sound. Gaining now.

All at once he caught a glimpse of Ward, in the vague pool of light below a curtained window. Bald head and T-shirt and jeans—he was still wearing them.

The man had almost passed beyond the light when he sprawled. Caught his foot on something and went all the way down. The notebook flew free again.

Travis doubled his speed and yanked the .38 from his pocket—enough fucking around.

He leveled it as Ward pushed up to a crouch.

But he didn’t fire.

He didn’t need to.

Ward made one desperate grab for the notebook, almost collapsing again as he did, then heard Travis’s running footsteps and threw himself sideways out of the light. The book stayed right where it’d fallen.

Travis pulled up short beneath the window. Stood there catching his breath and listening. He heard Ward staggering in the dark twenty feet off, and then silence again. Had he stopped? Was he weighing his chances of fighting for the notebook?

Travis kept the pistol leveled, aimed toward the last place he’d heard movement. He kept his eyes in that direction too, as he knelt and scooped up the book.

He stared another five seconds, the gun shaking in his small hand.

Then he tucked the notebook against himself like a football, turned back the way he’d come from, and ran.

Travis emerged into the light on Broadway. He heard sirens nearby in the night, coming from several directions and getting louder by the second. He remembered the gunshot inside Garret’s place. There’d be a dozen police cars on this block within minutes.

He sprinted across both wide sections of Broadway and went north toward Ashland, the first street free of construction.

He went east and north for two blocks, then turned west and made a wide swing around the hospital and the crime scene, coming at last to where he’d left the Chevelle. There was a serious-looking ticket stuck under the wiper. He discarded it, set the notebook on the passenger seat, started the car, and got the hell out of Baltimore.

Twenty miles south on I–95, he took an exit to a huge shopping mall. The parking lot was a ten-acre tundra of neat yellow lines and stark white cones of light. There wasn’t a single car in it but his own. He parked out in the center so he could see trouble coming a long way off. He turned on the dome light and opened the notebook.

The first page was blank.

So was the second.

And every other page in the book.

He flipped back to the beginning and saw what he’d missed at first glance: four or five ragged strips trapped inside the spiral binding, where pages had been torn out.

He understood what the zipper-like sound had been, and why Ward had shouted to obscure it.

He got out and stood beside the car and screamed loud enough to hurt his throat. An animal shriek that rolled away across the dark fields and half-built developments at the edge of suburbia.

He paced for a long time, wandering between the car and the nearest light post. Its base was bolted into a concrete cylinder covered with flaking yellow paint. He found himself kicking it every time he reached that end of his track, and wondered how much of his ten-year-old self he was experiencing, emotionally.

He realized he was putting off snapping out of the memory. Stalling. Had no idea how to break the news to Paige and Bethany. He could lie and put his performance in a better light—it wasn’t as if they could check—but had no intention of doing so. He’d tell them the whole thing. He just didn’t want to do it yet.

Reaching the car again, he leaned in and took the notebook off the seat. He stood with his back against the door and stared at the cover in the pale mercury light.

He flipped it open. An entirely idle move.

But he drew a quick breath at what he saw.

The angled light revealed indentations in the page. The ghosts of whatever had been written on the sheet above it, pressed deep by the tip of the pen.

He straightened and moved closer to the light post. Tilted the book and swiveled his body, seeking just the right glare.

The instant he found it his optimism faded. There were indentations, for sure, but they’d come from several pages above this one. A stacked mess of handwriting, so jumbled that he could make no sense of it.

Except for two lines.

Two places where, as it’d happened, there’d been no overlap.

He put his eyes three inches from the paper and scrutinized the words, feeling his skin prickle even before he’d begun to read. It struck him that this was an alien message. Spoken by a human and transcribed by a human, but an alien message all the same.

He let his eyes track over the two lines.

The first was impossible to draw meaning from—it was the end of one sentence and the beginning of another.

a passageway beneath the third notch.

Look for

He considered it for a moment anyway. It seemed to be part of a detailed set of directions. A route to take and something to search for at some given location—a place with notches, whatever that meant in this context. A castle wall? A rock formation somewhere? There had to be a million places that fit the bill, and there was nothing in the line to narrow the field. Travis stared at it a second longer and then let it go.

The second line was farther down and more softly impressed—it must’ve come from an even earlier page. It was a perfect sentence. Travis read it and felt the blood retreat from his face.

Some of us are already among you.