2.

It took a little over thirty minutes to reach Jeff’s “safe house”: a rickety-looking old colonial home standing in the center of a clearing, surrounded on all sides by trees. There was a detached barn slightly off to one side and behind the main structure. Moss grew green on its roof, and the door stood ajar, allowing me to catch a tempting glimpse of some mysterious machine. Signs were posted along the drive, indicating that we were crossing onto private property, and trespassers would be prosecuted.

“Home sweet home,” said Jeff, parking in front of the house and turning off the engine. Sitting up a little straighter, he called into the back, “We’re here. Don’t touch anything until I’ve turned off the security system, and do not try to walk across the field.”

“Gopher holes?” I asked.

“Sure, if by ‘gopher holes’ you mean ‘land mines,’” he said, and opened the door, sliding out of the van.

I hurried to do the same, careful to keep my feet on the paved drive as I ran around the front of the van to catch up with Jeff. “Land mines?” I demanded. “What the hell do you mean, land mines?”

“I mean explosive devices primed to explode if someone steps on them,” he said. “Sometimes it rains raccoon in the middle of the night, which is messy, but I know nobody’s going to break in.”

“What the hell?”

“You just said that,” he said, and glanced meaningfully over his shoulder at the others as they climbed out of the van. “Maybe you should go fill your friends in, before they decide to go for a walk off the beaten path and get themselves a one-way ticket to kingdom come.” Then he strolled toward the porch, leaving me to decide which way to turn.

Graham’s voice drifted around the van, slightly raised in the way I’d come to recognize as uncertainty. He got boisterous when he didn’t know what else to do. A boisterous Graham was a Graham inclined to do big, bold things that made him look confident—like walking into a stranger’s field to poke around for snakes.

I spun on my heel and ran toward the voices. Sure enough, there was Graham, moving toward the edge of the driveway, clearly intending to go on an unchaperoned field trip. I put on an extra burst of speed, grabbing his arm before he could step into the grass. Graham turned to blink at me, surprised.

“Land mines,” I said.

His surprise melted away, replaced first by shock, and then by horror. “Land mines?” he echoed, at a much higher volume. “Stasia, what the hell?”

“That’s what I said when he told me about them.” I glanced over my shoulder at the house. Jeff was on the porch. He’d produced a tablet, and was typing something out—presumably the code to deactivate the security systems. There must have been more than one. There was no other reason for things to have taken this long.