“My dad has a briefcase he takes to work every day,” Dani said. “He leaves it in the den every night, under the desk. I found a way to peel back the inner lining and hide the recorder inside. I didn’t know if it would work—if it would pick up any sound at all, from in there. And most of the time it didn’t. I was lucky to get even two or three minutes of conversation in a whole day. I think it all depended on how close people happened to be, to the briefcase. But yeah, I heard a little—my dad talking to people he works with.”

Dani stepped back from the half-melted Jeep. She turned and slowly trailed her flashlight across the wide-open floor, from one metal wreck to another. Sam saw that they were all target vehicles, or the wasted remains of them. Not all of them were melted. Some were just blown apart. One, an old tank of some kind, had been shattered into pieces like a glass sculpture. All that remained was the gun turret, resting tilted on a pile of jagged metal shards. Sam couldn’t even guess what could’ve done that.

But the room itself he didn’t have to guess about. This place had been some kind of proving ground for weapons. Very secret, very dangerous weapons.

“After the first week of hiding the recorder,” Dani said, “Lauren and I understood pretty much everything. There were random little details, like the door code for these abandoned stations, but mostly what we got was the big picture—the part I already told you. That the adults in this town work for the military. And the town itself is one big camouflage tarp to cover it all. Fake shops. Fake old schoolhouse. Fake history. Fake everything.”

Dani finished her slow turn with the flashlight, coming full circle.

“But why would they bother doing that?” Sam asked. “The military has regular bases all over the country. They have places way out in the desert, surrounded by minefields and armed guards. When they want to keep things secret, they can do it there. Why would they need Ashland?”

“I wondered that, too. All I could think of is something that scares me.”

“What?”

“What if they’re keeping other kinds of secrets here?” Dani said. “Not just important things, but … illegal things. Like things you can’t be officially working on, at some ordinary base.”

Sam didn’t answer. He felt a chill as if a breeze had suddenly blown over his skin, though the air in the chamber remained as still as it must have for decades.