“I don’t imagine we were,” Dryden said. “No, somebody strapped us down on a gurney and pumped our veins full of that shit. Twelve years old. Jesus Christ.”

“So we … witnessed something?” Danica asked. “You said that was why they used to do that, right? Because people saw something they weren’t supposed to?”

“Yeah.”

Danica rested a hand on the scrub file again. The pages and pages of redacted nothingness.

“What the hell did we witness?” she whispered. “What and where?”

“And why is someone trying to kill us over it now, after twenty-nine years?”

Dryden stared at the pages and tried to think of anyone who could help them look into it. Any old contact from his time in the military, who might be familiar with this kind of thing—any loose thread to pull on.

No one came to mind. Anyone old enough to have been involved in something like this—somebody with that level of clearance back in 1989—would probably be retired or dead by now.

“I don’t know how we’re supposed to dig into this,” Dryden said. “I don’t even know where to start.”

Danica looked up through the windshield again, at the ashen water and the overcast.

“I might,” she said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Forty miles shy of Flagstaff, the mountains rose out of the desert like a shallow-sloping coastline above the sea, visible from the freeway in the light of a three-quarter moon. The slopes were covered with dense pine forest, marked here and there by the snaking routes of switchback roads leading upward, disappearing into the folds of the landscape.

It was just past ten o’clock at night. Dryden was driving. Danica was asleep in the reclined passenger seat; she had drifted off half an hour earlier.

Before that, they had talked for hours, all the way across California and a good chunk of Arizona. The talk had been practical at first: the specifics of where they were going, and who they hoped to meet there.

The where was Shiprock National Forest, not far ahead now, south and west of Flagstaff in the mountains that butted up against I-40.