That circle out ahead was nobody’s farmland, though: the thing was six miles across. And it sure as hell hadn’t been harvested. It was wilderness land, its details coming into clearer view with each second as the chopper drew nearer. The dark green that filled the circle was tall prairie grass, choked everywhere with random scrub brush and groves of hardwood trees, some of them probably fifty feet tall. Their leaves showed the first traces of autumn color setting in. Here and there among them, the standing ruins of farmhouses and barns jutted up out of the grassy sea, like beached relics in a tidal basin.

Where roads had once been, there were now just faintly indented lines in the wavy surface of the weed tops, hinting at root-fractured asphalt and runoff ditches hidden below. All of it looked ghostly under the pink sky, in the sidelong light of dawn.

Far out ahead, at what Dryden judged to be the center of the circle, stood the clustered remains of the town itself. He could see two separate patches of decaying sprawl: a roughly square shape that might have been a small downtown, and a half-moon shape just north of there. He guessed the half-moon had been a residential subdivision, because the whole thing was densely overgrown with tall trees—much taller than the random groves that had sprung up everywhere else. Which meant they were older. Probably they had been full-grown shade trees even twenty-nine years ago, spreading over the neat sidewalks and back yards of Ashland.

The chopper was closing in now, coming up to the southern boundary of the circle. Dryden swept his gaze slowly left to right one last time, taking in the vastness of the thing.

They set up what they called an exclusion zone around the accident site, Russell Moss had said, at a radius of three miles from Ashland on all sides.

Now as the chopper went into a hover and began to descend, Dryden took in the chain-link fence that marked the boundary between the circle and the land around it. In the fields that butted up against the fence from outside, tractor furrows and short-chopped corn stalks extended right to the boundary itself. Local farmers weren’t letting a square foot go to waste. In the gleam of sunlight, Dryden saw tangles of razorwire arrayed along the top of the fence, spooling away in both directions as far as he could see.

He found himself doing the math, regarding the fence: the circle was six miles in diameter, and six times pi was just under nineteen.

Nineteen miles of chain-link and coiled wire.

“Jesus,” he whispered.

He glanced at Danica, sitting beside him. She was staring out the window, too, taking it all in with wide eyes. She turned and met his gaze. Her eyebrows went up and down in a little shrug, as if to say, We’ll see what happens.

“Welcome back,” she said.