To Dryden, it felt as if someone had just dumped half a dozen new ingredients into the mix, each one of which wanted his full attention right now. A whole cluster of sudden questions competed for his focus:

What was she doing here?

How was she involved in all this?

How much did she know?

At that moment Lauren cocked her head, reacting to a sound. Dryden realized it was the distant chorus of human screams and intermittent gunfire, still far away in the woods.

The effect on Lauren was instant—the fear in her eyes intensified, and her gaze darted back and forth between Danica and Dryden, full of her own questions: What is this? What’s happening?

Which told Dryden at least one thing for sure: Lauren Coleman didn’t know what Rigel was. She had closed herself inside the fridge when she saw the gas cloud coming, but right now, listening to the chaos that the gas had created, she was clueless.

Dryden flipped the wallet closed, stepped forward and held it out to Lauren. For a moment she only stared at it, blinking, and then she grabbed it from him and clutched it close to herself.

Still standing there with his arm extended, Dryden offered a hand to help her up.

“We need to talk,” he said. “But first we need to move. Will you come with us?”

Lauren Coleman held his gaze, her breathing still fast and scared.

But she nodded and took his hand.

They left the house through a collapsed section of the living room wall, and a few seconds later they were clear of the woods, moving south onto the grassy slope that led toward downtown. Three hundred yards out, they turned east toward a pocket of scrub brush. There were dozens more thickets just like it, farther away; if they needed to get more distance from the woods, they could do so without the stricken FBI personnel seeing them. The tall grass itself offered good cover, as long as they stayed low.

From the stand of brush, they watched the south edge of the subdivision. Dryden could just make out the screams now, and the gunfire had tailed off almost to nothing.

In the sunlight, Dryden noticed something about Lauren Coleman that he’d missed in the dim space of the house: her left arm had lines of thick, hardened scar tissue running from her bicep to her forearm, crisscrossing and snaking everywhere. The marks of some horrible injury in the past. The elbow, in particular, seemed to have taken the brunt of whatever happened: faded but still visible depressions in the skin hinted at surgical pins and rods, long since removed. It looked like someone had taken a jackhammer to that arm, and then a battlefield surgeon with sweaty hands had bolted and screwed and stapled it back together—years or even decades ago.

The woman’s composure was better than before, though she still looked badly rattled.