Ink snorted. “He searched for it after he murdered us with the poison. When he realized I didn’t have it on me he wanted to know where it was. I lied. Told him you stole it when you took Ash. Turns out I’m pretty good when it comes to lying.”

“Probably a side effect of your talent for the recorder,” Rancourt said. “I’m a pretty good liar, too. So Barrow believed you?”

“Yeah. He didn’t think much of me or the others. He didn’t like any of us. Figured we were all weak compared to him and the Piper.”

“Just assets to be used and discarded.”

“I guess,” Ink muttered.

“Where is the recorder?” Rancourt asked.

“When things went wrong in the mountains I got a real bad feeling. I knew the recorder was valuable to the Piper and, like I said, I didn’t trust Barrow. So after we made it here I buried the recorder out back. Barrow believed me when I told him you had it. He was pissed, but we were dead as far as he was concerned, so he left.” Ink looked across the room. “What’s your friend doing to Ox? I told you, you don’t have to murder him. He’s already gone. Just a matter of time.”

“My friend’s name is North Chastain,” Rancourt said. “He saved Ash, and he thinks he can probably stabilize you and your pals.”

“Whatever Barrow injected these kids with is complicating things,” Chastain warned from the other side of the room.

Ink tried to process what was happening. “Ash is alive?”

“And talking,” Rancourt said. “That’s how we found you. The doctors at Halcyon were able to break through the hypnotic suggestion. That’s how we got the location of this motel.”

“Huh?” Ink stopped because Chastain was aiming a clear crystal object shaped like a flashlight at Ox.

Energy suddenly illuminated the room. Ink could have sworn he was seeing auroras. Hallucinating. Maybe he was imagining everything that was happening.

Ox sucked in a hoarse breath. His eyes opened. He stared at Chastain.

“What the fuck?” Ox said.

“You’re stable,” Chastain said. “You’ll live. But the instability was in the psychic wavelengths. They were artificially enhanced by the treatments you were receiving. You didn’t have the control or the power to handle them. The result was that you were slowly going insane. Eventually you would have died. Whatever was in the poison accelerated the process. It was sending you straight into a coma.”

“I don’t understand,” Ox muttered.

“Here’s the short version,” Chastain said. “From now on you’ll have whatever talent you had before the Piper started enhancing you.”

“Seriously? I’m not going to die?”

“Not today,” Chastain said.

He moved on to Trev and repeated the process. Trev convulsed and gasped like a drowning man who has reached the surface just in time. He gazed, dumbfounded, at Chastain.