She turned her head and kissed his cheek, and for a long time they stood staring over the treetops at the Pacific. The night was clear; they could see the lights of the Channel Islands on the horizon.

Then came the sound of an engine, and the glow of headlights through the trees—a vehicle winding its way up the switchback road. It pulled up and stopped on the paver bricks in front of the house: a black SUV with federal plates. The back door opened, and Jack Grace stepped out—on one shoe-clad foot and one metal prosthetic.

They gave him a tour of the place; he had a cane to go with the artificial foot, but he mostly got by without it. He’d been fitted with the prosthetic in December, and was using it continuously now.

The three of them sat at the makeshift table in the dining room: a sheet of plywood on sawhorses, surrounded by lawn chairs. The house was not officially certified for occupancy, but there was no law against sleeping in your own construction site; in the past few weeks, Dryden and Danica had spent most of their nights here. The rest of the time, they stayed at Dryden’s place in El Sedero.

In spite of the month-long absence from her classes last fall, Danica had finished the semester with passing grades. After that she’d begun the process of transferring her credits to UC Santa Barbara; Dryden had convinced her, without much arm-twisting, that he needed someone to handle the business side of flipping houses.

There was pizza in the jobsite fridge in the kitchen, and a microwave on the chipboard countertop, but Grace passed; he’d eaten on the way. He accepted a beer from the fridge, and the three of them sat talking as the breeze rolled through the old house.

They talked about Rigel—as much as Grace had heard from the higher-ups. From the sound of it, Ellis Pierce had kept everything in a single secure location: his stock of the gas, the ingredients and tools for making it, the written knowledge that amounted to the recipe.

When the authorities had finally located that site and cracked it open, there was no sign anyone else had been into it since Pierce died. No reason to think any sample of Rigel, or any copy of that recipe, had gotten away when Pierce’s network scattered. All of it was in the government’s hands now.

“That’ll help me get to sleep,” Danica said.

“It’s the best we could have asked for,” Grace said. “They’re not big on disinventing things. Christ, they’ve still got smallpox in a vial somewhere, for some kind of rainy day.”

“These people need to pick up a hobby,” Danica said. “Desperately.”

Dryden stood and went to the window. He could just hear the hiss of traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway, far below through the trees.