“What are you doing then?” He turns to look at her. His face isn’t happy or determined; it’s something else entirely, a look she doesn’t recognize. Bewilderment? Dismissal? Is that sadness? She wants him to smile again, so she does, so wide she feels her teeth clench.

“I’m here to help.” He snorts. That half smile again. Tami presses into the accelerator. “Laugh all you want. You’ll see.”

Another ten minutes north, and the roadside development drops down to a smattering of homes. He surveys the new emptiness, the scrubby land that starts just past the shoulder. The cacti are tall here, taller than a man. “Are we still in Scottsdale?”

“Technically, North Scottsdale,” she says. “It’s not much farther.”

They curve up to the compound entrance, the sandstone sign lit from below. Above, Frank Lloyd Wright’s low-slung buildings are dark shapes against a craggy backdrop of mountains. Tami knows a service road, five hundred feet past the main entrance, with a gate they rarely lock.

They take the long way around the compound, rutted roads carved into the mountainside. The moon casts everything in strange greens and browns, purples in places you wouldn’t expect. Once, this whole landscape was filled with tents and lean-tos, Frank’s disciples camping in the desert, hoping to gain, by proximity, some expertise from the great master. Hundreds came during the Depression, paying for the opportunity to quarry stones and put them in place, the already-old man directing them with the tip of his cane. The steady flow continued for decades, long after Wright’s passing, first his widow and then his apprentices directing studies. But as the rest of architecture came to believe in technology, to prefer homes not with canvas louvers but with windows that shut, the stream of students slowed to a trickle. Now, only a handful come each year. Tami’s heard a few stalwarts still camp far up the hill, in those last places from which you can’t see the power lines and the perpetual glow of the city. Those holdouts won’t bother them tonight.

She parks the car next to a stand of acacias. Jason comes around and opens her door with a wobbly bow, and she thanks him. The electricity has returned, zapping between them, and she runs a finger across his abs. “Follow me.”