Eph picked it up, the camera small and light enough to fit into his pocket. “Think I could borrow this for a little while?”

Zack nodded slowly. “Is it the eclipse, Dad? Turning people into zombies?”

Eph reacted with surprise—realizing the truth was not much more plausible than that. He tried to see this thing from the point of view of a very perceptive and occasionally sensitive eleven-year-old. And it drew something up in him, from a deep reservoir of feeling. He stood and hugged his boy. An odd moment, fragile and beautiful, between a father and son. Eph felt it with absolute clarity. He ruffled the boy’s hair, and there was nothing more to be said.

Kelly and Matt were having a whispered conversation in the kitchen, leaving Nora and Setrakian alone in the glassed-in sunroom off the back of the house. Setrakian stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the glowing sky of early night, the third since the landing of the accursed airplane, his back to her.

A clock on the shelf went tick-tick-tick.

Setrakian heard pick-pick-pick.

Nora sensed his impatience. She said, “He, uh, he’s got a lot of issues with his family. Since the divorce.”

Setrakian moved his fingers into the small pocket on his vest, checking on his pillbox. The pocket was near his heart, as there were circulatory benefits to be gleaned just from placing nitroglycerin close to his aged pump. It beat steadily if not robustly. How many more beats did he have in him? Enough, he hoped, to get the job done.

“I have no children,” he said. “My wife, Anna, gone seventeen years now, and I were not so blessed. You would assume that the ache for children fades over time, but in fact it deepens with age. I had much to teach, yet no student.”

Nora looked at his walking stick, stood up against the wall near her chair. “How did you…how did you first come to this?”

“When did I discover their existence, you mean?”

“And devote yourself to this, over all these years.”

He was silent for a moment, summoning the memory. “I was a young man then. During World War Two, I found myself interred in occupied Poland, very much against my own wishes. A small camp northeast of Warsaw, named Treblinka.”

Nora shared the old man’s stillness. “A concentration camp.”

“Extermination camp. These are brutal creatures, my dear. More brutal than any predator one could ever have the misfortune of encountering in this world. Rank opportunists who prey on the young and the infirm. In the camp, myself and my fellow prisoners were a meager feast set unknowingly before him.”

“Him?”

“The Master.”

The way he said the word chilled Nora. “He was German? A Nazi?”