All at once he blinked and turned again. He looked at the baseball display case—he and Dani had left it on the floor after searching it. He stared at the team logo across the top of the case’s front.

“You said Lauren’s dad grew up in Philadelphia,” he said.

Dani answered without looking up. “Yeah.”

“You ever been there?”

“No.”

“I have,” Sam said. “My uncle lives in Philly, on the east side. The New Jersey side.”

“Okay.”

“There’s a big pine forest up there, just a few miles from my uncle’s house. It’s a thousand square miles of wilderness, right there in the middle of Jersey. But people who live around there … people who grew up there, like Lauren’s dad … they don’t call it a forest. They have a different word for it. You know what it is?”

Dani finally raised her head. She met his eyes. Her expression had taken on an edge of hope—she could see he was going somewhere with this.

“They call it the Barrens,” Sam said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

On their bikes it took only a few minutes to reach the pine grove, after stopping at Dani’s house for two flashlights. The woods, maybe twice the size of a football field, filled out the northwest corner of a square-mile section of farmland. They stashed their bikes in the ditch and stepped into the trees. Inside, the air was cool and clean-scented. Shafts of green-tinted sunlight shone through. The ground was dry and sandy and carpeted with dead needles.

Sam had imagined the entrance to Station 9 would be the same as that of Station 14: something like the access stairs to a subway platform. But before he’d even begun scanning the ground for anything like that, Dani leaned close to him and pointed ahead through the trees.

Just visible through the trunks and low pine boughs, forty or fifty yards away, stood a small wooden structure. They wove their way through the trees until they were standing in front of the thing.

It was a shack, abandoned for what must be decades. The thing was made of rough-sawn planks tacked together with nails. It leaned heavily to the left, the wall beams on that side rotted and falling apart. There was a wooden door on the front, latched shut with an iron lock that had long-since rusted itself into a single fused lump. Which didn’t matter, anyway—there were broken-out openings in the walls that were large enough to step through.

Sam went to the nearest of these and leaned in with his flashlight on. Dani stepped up to another, to his right.