That last part made sense, Dryden thought. Even ordinary memories were connected like that. How many times had he recalled some long-ago experience and found it linked to others? A high-school dance, a fight in the hallway afterward, a friend joking around later with an ice pack to his cheek. Memories strung together in a daisy chain.

“What does Ashland look like now?” Dryden asked. “If it was supposed to mimic an ordinary town in 1989—”

“It’s been fenced off and abandoned ever since the accident,” Grace said. “The parts above ground probably won’t look familiar now, after almost thirty years of decay. We’ll have you look at them anyway, in case they spark something. But according to the binder notes, there are underground complexes on-site, and it indicates that you two may have been inside some of them, one way or another. Those parts of the facility won’t have changed at all since then.”

“Like the Bode Museum,” Danica said.

Grace nodded.

Outside and far below, Dryden saw details of civilization sliding into view again. A few midsized cities along the dull orange artery of a freeway. He realized his jaw had tightened, involuntarily. He let it relax, and turned away from the window.

Danica was watching him. “Something wrong?” she asked.

He started to answer, but cut himself off, unsure of how to say it. Unsure of what he felt, even.

“What is it?” Danica said.

Dryden looked at her. “I hope we remember as much as we need to. But—”

He stopped again. He didn’t want to say the rest—didn’t want to admit it. He exhaled hard. Fine, what the hell?

“That other thing we witnessed,” he said. “The thing that was worse than the accident itself. There’s a part of me that hopes we don’t remember it at all. A part of me that’s scared shitless to find out what we saw. And I don’t know why.”

Danica stared at him a few seconds longer, then blinked and looked away. “I thought I was the only one,” she said.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Dryden was staring at Ashland for close to a minute without even realizing it. From five hundred feet up in the chopper, looking out over the landscape in the breaking light, the enormous green circle out ahead of him might have been just another crop field with a radial sprinkler system. He had seen them all his life from the windows of airliners, dotting the country like checkers on a grid. He could see a dozen of them now, off to the left and right; the crops had already been harvested and the fields were brown and vacant, but their perfectly round outlines remained.