His favorite among his weird meals, not for the taste but for what it signified, was koi pla—raw fish mixed with live red ants—first enjoyed from a rusting hubcap while motoring up the Mekong River on the border of Laos in northeastern Thailand. That trip—the distance he traveled to get there, the smells he encountered—the sweetness of lemongrass and coriander, the pungency of dried fish and durian. The soft, melodic rhythms he overheard in markets and on buses. Heat so damp and thick you could swim in it. All of it evoked images of his father’s generation off to a land many would not return from, to a war that would forever change those who came back. Mourning veterans of the Korean and Vietnam Wars passed through Klay Funeral Home so often during Klay’s childhood that he came subconsciously to consider travel to Asia to be an important passage on the way to becoming a man. Thailand was his first Asian trip, and though he would later travel the world, that trip marked a break for him, a flag planted in the dirt of his life that said, I am no longer in Philadelphia. I am not Jack Klay’s son. I am free.

He opened another beer. Years later, he no longer experimented when it came to food overseas. No still water. No unskinned fruit. No raw vegetables. Nothing washed. He ordered the same meal every place he went anywhere in the world.

Fluke. That’s why he’d stopped eating exotic local meals, why he insisted on the same reliable chicken and fries no matter where he went. Years after that first trip, he went back to Thailand and reprised that first meal right down to the hubcap. He ended up in the hospital. It turned out, koi pla carries a parasite, a fluke that causes liver cancer and kills tens of thousands of people every year. You are very lucky, the nurse in Chiang Rai told him. His ailment was merely food poisoning. It wasn’t the risk of liver cancer that made him change his diet, though. It was the day and a half he spent kneeling in a tiled bathroom. He vomited through an appointment with a government official and nearly lost his story. Joyriding street food wasn’t worth it.

He opened ProtonMail and composed an update to Eady. There wasn’t much to say. He and Tenchant were in place. He would be interviewing Botha in the morning. He hit send.

A response appeared immediately, surprising him.

“Investigation window closing,” Eady replied.

Closing? He’d just arrived.

Klay replied with a question mark.

Eady wrote: “She’s got a leak. Botha secondary. SECURE HER FILES.”

Eady had sent him to investigate Botha. “A gift,” he’d said. “My last act as your handler.” Now his number one priority was Hungry’s files?