Lauren blinked a few times, her eyes just noticeably filming with moisture. She looked back and forth between the two of them, some kind of fragile hope in her expression.

Dryden spoke gently. “We still don’t remember much of anything about Ashland. Someone else filled us in, and then the FBI brought us here. Can you tell us how you knew about this place? How you got here?”

Lauren wiped at one eye, took a fast breath and nodded. “My family. I mean, there were letters my dad sent them back then, when he and I lived here. Just ordinary letters, but they had the name of the town, and—”

She stopped. Something changed in her eyes. A kind of hardening—like a heavy door falling shut.

“What’s wrong?” Danica asked.

“I’m sorry,” Lauren said. “I want to trust you. I just want to trust someone at this point, but … I don’t. The things that have happened to me in the last twenty-four hours … you wouldn’t believe it.”

“We might,” Dryden said.

Lauren wiped at her eyes again. “I don’t want to talk. I want to go to the authorities. You said you came with the FBI. Can you take me to them? I’ll talk to them.”

Dryden glanced at the tree-choked subdivision.

“Probably not the best time for a conversation with them,” he said. “Backup’s coming, maybe an hour away. They’ll talk to you.”

Lauren nodded. “Okay. Can we just wait here?”

“There’s a place we need to go see,” Dryden said. “It’s not far. You can come with us, if you want to.”

Lauren stood there, looking unsure. Looking lost.

“You don’t have to,” Dryden said. “But if you don’t, you shouldn’t stay right here, either. I’d get a long ways from that subdivision, and wait for the backup to get here. Either way, it’s up to you.”

Lauren turned an ear toward the woods atop the slope. The wind, rolling at them from that direction, carried the distant screams.

“Where are we going?” Lauren asked.

The underground staircase was invisible until the moment they were standing over it. It lay in the middle of a dense clutch of brush and scrubby trees, surrounded by the waving ocean of autumn weeds. Even from the air, the spotters in the chopper must have barely seen the thing.

Dryden stood next to Danica and Lauren, staring down into the black depths of the staircase. For just a second it gave him the impression of an open grave; he shoved the thought away and focused on what he was seeing—which wasn’t much. Between the low-angled morning sun, and the thick screen of foliage casting shadows, he could resolve only the first few stairsteps clearly. Beyond that, in the deep murk, he had only a vague impression of a door at the bottom.

For a long moment no one spoke. Or moved.