Dryden started to ask something, then stopped himself. He stared absently at the heat-rippled air above the metal grate, thinking.

All afternoon and evening, since he’d first understood that he and Danica were the witnesses who’d had their memories scrubbed, the obvious question had troubled him: how could he have witnessed anything in the first place? How could he have been within a thousand miles of government secrets, when he was twelve years old?

For Danica the connection had seemed clearer: at least her father had been in the military.

For Dryden it was a different story: his mother had served on the boards of a handful of charities, and his father had been an attorney for his entire professional life—a very successful one, working for corporate clients in Los Angeles, including a few movie producers and actors.

But if his father had moved the family to Ashland, Iowa, because his job demanded it, and if Ashland was a military post—

Did that mean his father had actually worked for the military? Without Dryden ever finding out?

On the face of it, the idea seemed ludicrous. The image of Ben Dryden in a uniform, going through weapons training, crawling in the mud under razorwire during a live-fire exercise—none of it matched the bookish, manicured mental picture Dryden had of the man.

Of course his father wouldn’t have actually had to be in the military to work for them. The armed forces did business with civilian contractors all the time, including lawyers.

He thought about it a moment longer and then pushed it away for the time being. He turned to Moss.

“What exactly did we witness there?” Dryden asked.

It took a while for Moss to begin speaking again. He once more took on the look of someone revisiting old knowledge—sorting photos in some shoebox in his head.

“There was an accident,” the man said. “Something they were working on, out there … it went bad. Real bad. It was a mass-casualty event, some number of deaths, a huge number of injuries. Whatever it was, it happened the night of July 20, 1989.”

“You don’t know what it was?” Danica asked.

Moss shook his head. “Maybe you misunderstand—I wasn’t actually stationed at Ashland. I wasn’t cleared for that kind of work. I was a twenty-six-year-old corporal based at Fort Leland, fifty miles east of there. About an hour before dawn on the twenty-first, they woke up everyone on my base and trucked us out to Ashland—or close to it, at least. They had us man the roadblocks that were going up by then. They set up what they called an exclusion zone around the accident site, at a radius of three miles from Ashland on all sides. They blocked every road. Nobody got in or out without clearance.”