“Well, if you’ll pardon the cliché, what goes around tends to come around.”

He shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t come around unless someone makes it come around.”

Hari decided then she liked him. Liked him a lot.

They spent the rest of the trip in relative silence. Hari didn’t know what Donny was thinking, but her own thoughts kept returning to those signals. She remembered the email address that sent the reports because it included an iconic Central Park West apartment building—almost as iconic as the Dakota: [email protected]. She’d pay a visit to the Allard as soon as she made it back to the city. She hoped “Burbank” referred to a person and not the Los Angeles suburb, because she had a ton of questions about the signals, and was pretty sure this Burbank had the answers.

As they hit the outskirts of Troy, Donny broke the silence.

“Drop me off at one of the airport hotels.”

“What? You’re staying?”

A nod. “Yeah. Got some unfinished business here.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“Let’s just leave it at that, okay?”

Was he trying to be mysterious? He wasn’t terribly good at it.

“You said someone needs to take Septimus down. You’re not planning something stupid, are you?”

He grinned. “Me? Stupid? In a way I wish I were. The thing is, I don’t have any sort of plan yet, so I want to stay here and work on one.”

“You can work on it back in the city.”

“Nope-nope-nope. Their stockpile is here. That’s the key to whatever they’re planning. That’s where I can hurt them.”

“You’re one guy, Donny, and they’re many. They’re the kind of people who find some wormhole to another planet and use it to hide their supplies. They operate on a whole different level than we know or can even imagine.”

“That’s why it’s got to be an excellent plan.”

Donny was adamant about staying so they stopped at a La Quinta outside the Albany airport. Hari admitted to herself that she was worried about him—worried enough that she accompanied him inside and continued trying during the registration process to talk him into coming back to New York. She even followed him to his room.

“We’re better off investigating the signals.”

“The signals?” He shook his head. “That’s the cosmic end of this. I can’t deal with cosmic. What I can deal with is real-world stuff like trucks and trailers. I just have to figure out how.”

“Okay, look,” she said. “Will you promise me one thing? Promise me you won’t get in their faces. Promise me you’ll keep arm’s length and do whatever you do anonymously. You said yourself these people are dangerous. Look what they did to your brother.”

She hated to bring that up, but Donny wasn’t some black ops veteran, he was just a hacker, and she had a sense that Septimus ran broader and deeper than either of them could imagine.

His expression darkened. “And that’s why they have to pay.”