“Nope. My dad kept our guns in a locked metal cabinet. I have no idea where the key is. I was going to break into a Walmart or something to find one, but then I heard Manny’s message and thought it would be best to get here as fast as I could.” Wyatt stares at the rifle strapped to Trey’s shoulder. Trey has hardly let it out of his sight.

Trey stares right back.

Then he clears his throat. “So, hey, I think I’m leaning toward Plan C,” Trey says.

I hate to say this, but I’m going to anyway: “Me too, Trey. Leaning toward Plan C. I mean, I don’t want to go near that tower. But I also don’t want to die young, and all of humanity and planet Earth along with me. And I think my not wanting everything to die is greater than my not wanting to go near the tower.”

“I can understand that,” Wyatt says with obvious reluctance. “And look, I’m not going to lie, I’m sad all the time now. Sometimes it’s so bad I forget to breathe. I have to do something. Otherwise . . .”

Tanq says nothing, busying herself with another yogurt. She’s hyperfocused on it, swirling it with her spoon, studying it like it contains the mysteries of the universe. After a moment, she absently piles a dollop of yogurt onto her spoon and offers it to Emmaline, who laps it up eagerly.

“I’m sad, too,” Trey says gently.

“Yeah,” I say.

“But Plan C is only viable if we have a ship,” Trey reminds us.

“That’s easy,” says Wyatt. “I saw a bunch on the way here from Ann Arbor. They’re all just floating out there, drifting. It was creepy.”

“Any coal barges?” I ask.

“Sure. There was one just off Port Clinton. Coal barges are huge. Hard to miss.”

“And where’s that?” Trey asks.

“About twenty miles northwest of here,” Wyatt says. “The barge looked weird, though. Kind of sideways? Might be stuck on something.”

Trey starts pacing, and even though the kitchen area is huge, his long legs eat up distance so that he only gets four strides before he has to turn. “Probably drifted there from Toledo,” he mutters, half to himself. “If it has fuel, we might be able to power it out of there. Then we find some kind of explosive, or at least lighter fluid . . .” His head snaps up. “Wyatt, how many barges was the towboat pushing?”

“Four? I think?”

“Four flats of coal,” Trey muses. “That’s enough to do serious damage.”

Tanq says, “It’s also enough to pollute the crap out of Lake Erie.”

“Like you Ohioans care,” says Wyatt. “Hey, remember how that river in Cleveland used to catch on fire?”

“Remember that town in Michigan where everyone got poisoned by drinking the water?” Trey snaps back.