More than a full day had passed since Dani had let him in on the truth about Ashland—the walk to Station 14 had happened the night before last. They had spent much of the time since then together. She’d shown him the written notes she’d made from nearly two months’ worth of audio recordings—the conversations she’d managed to capture by hiding the microcassette recorder in her dad’s briefcase. The notes were in a yellow legal pad that was about halfway filled up with her handwriting.

There were lots of details in the notes, though most of them didn’t make much sense. As Dani said, it was like listening in on dentists or car mechanics on the job, hearing just bits and pieces. But it all added up to the big picture clearly enough: the talk was strewn with military terminology—phrases like lieutenant and chain of command. Plenty of evidence about what Ashland was—just not much about what was actually happening here.

Not until the past week, anyway. That was when the notes started getting interesting.

Dani had caught the first sign of trouble five days ago. A man in her father’s office had spoken of something called the problem. In the notepad, Dani had underlined those two words, and in the margin she had written, He says that like it means something, like it’s something my dad is supposed to understand.

For the next minute, the two men had spoken of the problem, but from the words on the page, there was no way to tell what any of the talk meant. Like most of the conversations Dani had written down, there were too many unknown references, things that were hinted at but not explained.

In fact, this conversation was worse than most of the others. Reading it, Sam had gotten the sense that these two men were speaking very cautiously about the problem. Because maybe they weren’t even supposed to be talking about the problem.

Whatever it might be.

Dani had caught a second conversation about it two days later, between her father and a different man. This other guy said he’d shown his twelve-year-old son how to load and fire the revolver he kept in his home office—just to be on the safe side. Just in case the problem ended up being as dangerous as it sounded. Dani’s father had told him not to sweat it, that nothing bad was going to happen, but this time Dani had written in the margin, Never heard my dad sound like this. Is he scared?

That was it, so far. Just those two oddball conversations about the problem. Sam and Dani had talked about it all afternoon yesterday, and then he’d lain awake for what felt like half the night before finally crashing out.