At the top of the stairs, an hour of climbing later, I came to new concrete steps and a portal of a door. Framed in a circle of stainless steel, the oval of the door shuttered like a closed storefront. A button next to it. No pass code here. But the button was thumb shaped, interactive.

That gave me pause. If I wasn’t the right person, would I suffer Ronnie’s fate?

I pushed the button anyway. The door slid up revealing a red-lit antechamber. Stepped inside and the door shut again. A light mist hissed out of holes in the walls. Moment of panic. Drugged, poisoned. Found out. Didn’t belong here. Had never belonged here.

But the mist had a pleasant scent and I realized I was being decontaminated. Run through some protocol.

Why did I have to be clean to get to the other side, but Ronnie had come back out contaminated?

After it was over, the portal opposite slid open, a large, dim-lit space beyond.

I hesitated once more. I’d been given so many last chances to turn away that I hadn’t recognized. Now was being given another one. To heed the warning that was Ronnie’s corpse. To recognize the limits of what I had left to give. No normal life waited outside. But life of a kind waited. I could try a different part of the King Range wilderness. I could become expert at avoiding militias. Sleep by day, wander by night. Pipe dream. Faint home.

One thing I knew: if I crossed that threshold, I wouldn’t be going back there. Felt it in my bones.

So I bent and leaned through the door into another world.

[107]

You could say Silvina had built a bunker out of a cavern. Or a command-and-control center out of the top of a mountain. You could call it many things. You might be looking at it right now. You might know more about it than me. It would’ve taken years. Secrecy. Patience. So many millions. Piece by piece. Using different experts and contracts so no one knew the full extent of it. Toward the end, she must have trusted only “Friends of.” I had a vision of servants entombed with their ruler.

I had come out into a nondescript, rectangular space shoved up against the side of the mountain. Framed by rough-hewn stone walls and a steel-beam-reinforced ceiling studded with the dimmest possible blue lights. Every surface seemed chosen to reject mold and decay. A sterile quality I didn’t like but that was purposeful.