Sam stood waiting in the darkness next to the picnic table, on the grass-covered slope below the subdivision. All around him, the weeds moved in the night wind. He was staring south past the lights of downtown Ashland, into the miles of open farmland beyond, where Echo House stood. He couldn’t see it at the moment. He couldn’t see the barn down the road from it, either—the barn that made the echo. The barn Lauren Coleman’s father had spent his last few breaths talking about.

Pant legs swished in the weeds. Sam turned. Against the streetlight glow of the subdivision, Dani’s silhouette came toward him and stopped.

It was just past midnight. Sam’s father had fallen asleep twenty minutes before. Sam had waited another ten, to be sure, then slipped out the window.

Dani had a pair of binoculars hanging from her neck. Sam had his own; it was his dad’s pair, scrounged from one of the movers’ boxes this afternoon.

“Ready?” Dani asked.

“Yeah.”

It was the first time they had spoken since returning from Station 9, early in the day. They had agreed to meet here as soon after midnight as possible. Then they’d hidden their bikes out in the grass of the slope, and Dani had gone back to her house alone, maybe to go ballistic and scream and break things—Sam thought he might have done that, if he were her. He had tried to imagine, all day since then, what it would feel like to learn your own father was involved in your friend’s abduction. To know he was part of something dangerous and illegal in all the worst ways, and that he would spend the rest of his life in prison when this was over with.

“How are you holding up?” Sam asked.

“Like I’m made out of toothpicks.” Dani’s voice sounded strained.

“Does it help to know you’re more of a badass than anyone I ever met?”

“No,” she said. Then: “Maybe a little.”

It was tricky riding down Truman in the dark, as opposed to walking down it as they had a few nights before. At bike speed, it took focus to keep from straying off the pitch-black pavement.

Downtown was deserted. The hanging streetlights swayed in the breeze. The two of them slipped past the storefronts and through the muted light, and in moments they were out in the deep night south of town.

It felt like an hour, but it actually took less than fifteen minutes to reach Echo House. Sam checked his watch as they rolled into the weed-choked yard: 12:18. Whatever Mr. Coleman had wanted them to watch for, it would happen an hour and forty minutes from now.