They dropped their bikes and stood staring west toward the barn. Sam remembered thinking it was about a quarter mile away, when he’d seen it in daylight. Right now he couldn’t see it at all. The barn was completely dark, inside and out.

Or seemed to be.

As he stared, Sam thought he could make out vague traces of light. Tiny slivers of it here and there, like the outlines of windows or doors.

“Are you seeing that?” he asked.

Dani nodded.

They trained their binoculars on the place; it was hard to dial in the focus, with nothing obvious to use for a reference, but after moving the binocs around for a moment, Sam found one of the faint slivers—it slipped past his frame of view, a blurry scratch of light. He found it again and adjusted the focal depth, and resolved it.

It was the outline of a window, faintly rimmed with a glow.

“The lights are on inside the barn,” Sam said, “with the windows covered.”

Dani nodded. “You think someone’s in there?”

“I don’t know.”

For a long time they just stared, moving their viewpoints over the dark surface of the building. Sam made out the shapes of three windows and a giant door—the kind of door a tractor could fit through.

“I think we should get closer,” Dani said.

Echo House’s weed-covered lot was surrounded by cornfields for hundreds of yards, including the entire quarter mile distance to the barn. Sam and Dani left their bikes hidden in the ditch near Echo House, and set out into the cornfield on foot. It felt like a risk, but Sam knew it didn’t actually make a difference. If it came down to running for it, the bikes would be no help on the soft earth of the cornfield, and even less help on the road, against bad guys who almost certainly had a car.

They made their way across the open field as quickly as possible. As they’d done a few nights before, on the way to Station 14, they stayed on the compacted ground between the planted rows, where the soil would take no footprints.

The barn was due west of Echo House, but they angled slightly southward, row by row, as they went. They finally stopped at a point directly southeast of the barn, where the corn stalks gave way to a field planted with some dense, grasslike crop that Dani said was alfalfa. The alfalfa didn’t grow in rows; it covered the field in one flat mass, eight or ten inches high, providing an open view all the way to the yard that surrounded the barn.

Sam and Dani sat down just inside the corn. They were fifty yards from the barn’s nearest corner. This close, the haloed shapes of its windows and door were more discernible, but only slightly so. A passing driver would have thought the place was dark and deserted.