He stood again and considered the building—the schoolhouse. The front door hung a few inches ajar, and partly detached from its frame. It was mostly bare metal, rusted all over, but a few chips of red paint held on here and there, like tiny islands on a map—

A map of an alien world.

The phrase seemed to shove itself into his mind, from out of nowhere.

He crossed the yard to the cracked-open door, took hold of it and pulled. It swung outward with a protest of grinding metal, sharp and high-pitched. Two or three seconds later he heard that sound again, from far away to the west.

He and Danica turned in place. Dryden considered the barn, a quarter mile away, its giant side wall facing the schoolhouse.

Before Dryden could say anything, Danica brought her hands up in front of her and clapped them together—three times in a fast cadence. The staccato sound came back to them across the field, dampened and hollow.

“Echo House,” Danica said, seeming to think of the words even as she voiced them. “That’s what we called this place.”

As the house itself had done, the name immediately struck Dryden. Danica was right about it—no question of that.

He stared at the distant barn a moment longer, then turned and stepped into the dim interior of Echo House.

He saw a flagstone floor, and candleholders set into the walls, and a potbelly stove in a back corner of the single room. Every bit of it pinged his recognition.

Danica stepped in through the doorway and came up beside him. They stood staring at the place.

“It clicks,” Danica said. “But…”

“But that’s all it does. I don’t feel it connecting to anything else.”

Danica shook her head. “Nothing like that. Not yet.”

Dryden took in the room a few seconds longer, waiting for something else to come to him. Nothing did.

Don’t feel hurried. But hurry.

“Let’s look at the barn,” Dryden said.

From up close, the barn’s vibe was harder to put a finger on than Echo House’s. Standing in the overgrown yard before the giant building, Dryden studied the details of its exterior. Behind him, the sun was just above the horizon, glaring off the weathered wood of the structure. Dryden moved from place to place, trying to find an angle that looked familiar. None did.

“I can’t explain it,” Danica said. “I could swear we were here, but … the sight of it doesn’t trigger much of anything, for me.”

Dryden could make no sense of it, either. He felt the same certainty that the two of them had been here—even a vague intuition that they had watched this place, for some reason, maybe for hours. Yet its features, clear and sharp in the direct sunlight, stirred no recognition at all.