Rangan had to stop over and over again, overcome with emotion, tears streaming down his face, his body trembling in anger or remembered terror. Each time they offered to end the session. Each time he refused. People needed to know this. They needed to know.

When it was over they hugged him, both of them. Rangan held on for dear life, held onto them for what seemed like an eternity.

And after, he felt lighter. Abigail led him to another room. She peeled back a carpet, and there was a door in the floor there. She opened it, led him down a set of stairs, to a hallway, then a darkened room. The boys were there, on cots, already asleep. She led him to a cot of his own, hugged him again, and left.

Rangan lay there in a daze. It was over. It was really over. He was free again.

The sleeping minds of the boys surrounded him, engulfed him in hope, in a tranquility he hadn’t felt in months.

Rangan closed his eyes, breathed that hope in, and drifted off to a peaceful sleep.

Holtzmann’s first task was to send the underground railroad the rest of the files he’d promise them. He waited for the guard to leave. Then he closed his eyes, opened a control panel, paired his Nexus OS to his phone, used it to get online.

The signal quality was terrible. Zoe had been battering cell towers across the DC metro area. He had one bar of service, hardly any bandwidth at all.

He punched in the address of the anonymization service, waited, waited, waited, and finally it loaded. From there he went to the Nexus board, waited again for it to load, waited to put in his username and password, and for his inbox to load up.

Holtzmann pulled up the message in his inbox, started a reply to it, attached the already uploaded file, and hit Send.

Nothing happened. He had a moment of fearing that the connection had been lost. Then finally the screen updated as the packets got through.

He thought for a moment, then wrote another message to the underground railroad ID that had contacted him, this time with locations of other groups of Nexus children. The labs in Virginia, in Texas, in California.

Send.

Holtzmann waited, waited for confirmation that the short message had sent. The connection dropped out for a moment, then came back, then finally: Message Sent.

Holtzmann smiled grimly, nodded in satisfaction of having done something right, then turned to the other task at hand. The data from Warren Becker’s memory foil.

There were dozens of files here. He hunted through them, trying to understand what he was looking at. One caught his eye.

diary

That sounded like a good place to start.

He opened the file, started scanning for information about the PLF, anything that might confirm or dispel his fears.