There could be all sorts of reasons for that, Hodges thinks, and just because Jerome didn’t hear the suicide voice, it doesn’t mean that most of the kids who got those free games won’t.

“Let’s say this repeater gadget was only turned on during the last fourteen hours,” Hodges says. “We know it can’t have been earlier than when I tried out Dinah’s game, or I would have seen the number-fish and the blue flashes. So here’s a question: can those demo screens be amped up even if the gadgets are off?”

“No way,” Jerome says. “They have to be turned on. But once they are . . .”

“It’s active!” Holly shouts. “That fracking zeetheend site is active!”

Jerome rushes to her desk in the outer office. Hodges follows more slowly.

Holly turns up the volume on her computer, and music fills the offices of Finders Keepers. Not “By the Beautiful Sea” this time, but “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” As it spools out—forty thousand men and women every day, another forty thousand coming every day—Hodges sees a candlelit funeral parlor and a coffin buried in flowers. Above it, smiling young men and women come and go, moving side to side, crisscrossing, fading, reappearing. Some of them wave; some flash the peace sign. Below the coffin is a series of messages in letters that swell and contract like a slowly beating heart.

AN END TO PAIN

AN END TO FEAR

NO MORE ANGER

NO MORE DOUBT

NO MORE STRUGGLE

PEACE

PEACE

PEACE

Then a stuttering series of blue flashes. Embedded in them are words. Or call them what they really are, Hodges thinks. Drops of poison.

“Turn it off, Holly.” Hodges doesn’t like the way she’s looking at the screen—that wide-eyed stare, so much like Jerome’s a few minutes ago.

She moves too slowly to suit Jerome. He reaches over her shoulder and crashes her computer.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she says reproachfully. “I could lose data.”

“That’s exactly what the fucking website is for,” Jerome says. “To make you lose data. To make you lose your shit. I could read the last one, Bill. In the blue flash. It said do it now.”

Holly nods. “There was another one that said tell your friends.”

“Does the Zappit direct them to that . . . that thing?” Hodges asks.

“It doesn’t have to,” Jerome says. “Because the ones who find it—and plenty will, including kids who never got a free ­Zappit—will spread the word on Facebook and all the rest.”

“He wanted a suicide epidemic,” Holly says. “He set it in motion somehow, then killed himself.”

“Probably to get there ahead of them,” Jerome says. “So he can meet them at the door.”

Hodges says, “Am I supposed to believe a rock song and a picture of a funeral is going to get kids to kill themselves? The Zappits, I can accept that. I’ve seen how they work. But this?”