As if he’d seen this encounter in his daydreams a hundred times before.

I said nothing.

It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter now.

[97]

We searched for three days. All along the gravel slope, the plateaus above that greeted us like strange moonscapes. We labored at our task with at first the serious formality of captive and captor. Then, as we found nothing, more like coequals. Because I had begun to become frantic, too. The site of the main mining excavation had been filled in. A brief elation at the discovery of a kind of silo dissolved when it became clear it was empty. Some sort of nascent septic system.

By the second day, I knew in my gut that we wouldn’t find it. If it had ever been there. Jack was surly, snapped often, smoked more. Urged me on as if I was the problem. As if he would have found it if I hadn’t been there. As if I put out some invisible field or aura obscuring the truth. When he accused me of knowing more than I’d told him, I shrugged. And he could see in the resignation that I had given up.

The weather got worse. We shared Jack’s tent on the wet gravel, me tied up, hands in front. He had a couple bottles of rum. He offered me a cup. I took it. I didn’t know rum from Adam, but it tasted good.

The lantern made his face crooked, febrile. Took away the redness. I could almost imagine he was the attractive man from the bar.

“Senseless anyway. I should’ve known better. How big a hole can you put in the world to kill it dead? You can’t. Whatever Silvina wanted to do—virus, bomb, whatever. It’s already done. We did it to ourselves. We’re always doing it to ourselves. And first rule of dealing with wildlife traffickers: they do not give a fuck about anything. Except money. Except Langer. Who thought he had a soul. What love does to you. What love deforms.”

“Sociopaths have souls?”

“Don’t be cute,” he said. “Shut up and drink your rum…”

Don’t be cute.

Langer, being interrogated by someone at a federal agency. The pages Allie had given me of the transcript. Mr. Redacted had used that wording, more than once. “Don’t be cute, Langer.”

“You ran Langer,” I said. “But why? What was Contila?”

“Eh? Says who. Who says I ran Langer?”

I ignored that.

“Agency-wide or just you solo?”

Hellmouth Jack gave me a look of respect that made me shudder inside.

“Jilly! You are a detective. Sort of. Okay, let’s do this. If you can answer this riddle. Tell me: what’s bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a breadbox?”

“So not agency-wide, but not just you.”

He looked at me sideways like a crow. “You’re not supposed to solve that riddle.”

“Maybe I just understand you.”

He’d picked up his gun, like I’d insulted him. No one was supposed to understand the great Hellmouth. Then he put it down, took a swig of rum.