“You come back to Washington with us.” I looked at Graham, and smiled, just a little, when I saw him nod. Returning my attention to the others, I said, “There’s room. Between his place and mine, there’s room. We can work on this together.”

“Why should I leave?” asked Jeff. “Why shouldn’t you stay here?”

“Because cultural literacy is part of why we bloomed here,” I said, and was gratified by the way his eyes widened, ever so slightly. “See? You feel it too. You’ve isolated yourself. Maybe that’s what you had to do in order to survive, but it isn’t going to make you as useful as you could be. As they’re going to want you to be.”

“And David and I?” asked Toni. “I’ve already told you I’m not going to be your ally. We’ll work against you.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, that’s how it goes, right? We don’t have an observatory for you. We don’t have the police on our doorstep either—not yet, anyway—and since I’m a homegrown crank, we’ll probably have some time. You can analyze the signal. You can try to find a way to stop us. One of us will have to succeed before the other, but that’s what it takes to be the hero of that horror movie, right?”

“I think it’s more of a creature feature, but you make a good point,” said Toni, with a glance at David. “I can make a few calls. Get the things we need delivered to the airport without involving the local authorities.”

“Won’t they just, I don’t know, arrest us at the airport?” asked David. “The TSA could disappear us forever without thinking about it twice.”

“But they won’t,” said Toni. “They like to have cause. They like to be able to say, ‘This is why we did this thing, and if you’re not careful, we’ll do it to you.’”

I thought about my own fears on the flight here, and said nothing. David was right. If the TSA decided to get involved, there was nothing we could do. But we couldn’t stay here, and it wasn’t like the trains were any safer, not since the powers of the TSA had been expanded to cover them as well as air travel. Taking the train just made it more likely that we’d disappear somewhere in the middle of the country, vanishing into a private government facility that might never let us out again. At least if we were on a plane, they’d have fewer options to snatch us.