“You want closure?” Joe challenged him, not backing down. “You want to go home? That’s where I’m going. Now you can come with me or not, your choice, but I don’t have much time left to work this out and I’ll be damned if I let it happen again!” He kept on packing, defiantly. “I came back here and I wasted six years staring through that barbed wire thinking it was a military mistake or some horrible design flaw they were trying to cover up. I kept looking at the hard science. What I knew. One day I’m tutoring a kid whose studying whale songs. I’m looking at his textbook—‘Soundscape Interpretation,’ ‘Echolocation.’ I’m looking at these graphs and diagrams and I realized that all the data I had been going crazy over before the plant blew wasn’t something structural, it wasn’t a leaking turbine or a submarine. It was language. It was talk. Hard science wasn’t the answer—this was biology.”

Ford had no idea what his dad was talking about. He watched in dismay as Joe fished a ratty old radiation suit from a pile of crap beside the bed. The suit resembled the ones the workers had used at the plant fifteen years ago, the type his mother had supposedly been wearing when she died. He wondered how the hell Joe had managed to get his hands on it.

“I met a guy runs a cargo boat off-shore,” Joe continued, trying to get it all out before Ford could interrupt him. “Every day he goes right past the reactor site. He dropped off a couple monitors on buoys for me.” He shook his head at the memory. “Nothing. A year of nothing. More than a year.” Years of frustration could be heard in Joe’s voice. “Two weeks ago—‘cause I check this thing like every other day just for the kick in the teeth—two weeks ago, I tune in and, ohmigod, there it is. Whatever it is that’s in there, whatever it is they’re guarding so carefully, it started talking again. And I mean talking. I need to get back to the house. I need my old disks if they’re still there. The answer’s in that data. I need to know that what caused this wasn’t just me, Ford. That I’m not who you think I am. I am not crazy. That wasn’t just a reactor meltdown. Something’s going on there. I need to find the truth and end this. Whatever it takes.”