“I quickly learned in order to survive, the past would have to die. Freda Stanson died when her family did. When the agents started calling me Blue, because of my eyes, it became my new name. Mother Blue, then, as I aged, Grandmother Blue, then Great-Grandmother Blue. My office in the Yucatan was covered in hundreds of pictures of my agents’ families. I had to fill a void. And it meant completely and utterly shunning anything that had to do with the United States. In time, it became a foreign country that conjured up too much pain to even think about. And it was the greatest mistake of my life. And if it hadn’t been for the Rapture, I would still be there now.”

“The Rapture?”

She took a deep breath. “The SSA’s code name for when the ships returned to Argentum and to all the bases where the abductees were contained all over the world. Including the rebuilt location in the Yucatan. When they were all taken up, you can’t imagine the internal chaos. The SSA thought they’d contained it all, but they didn’t count on your grandmother. Everyone at the office was whispering about it. For the first time, I got online to a US news website and read about the one case that had gone public.”

Blue shut her eyes and slightly shook her head. “I did not know that your heart could heal and break all at the same time. I realized then the great tragedy of my life. That it had all been a lie. They’d kept me in Mexico to silence me. And I knew, very soon, they would make certain that the widow of the library had finally gotten too old to live.

“So here I was: an old woman without working legs who needed to go on the run to find her daughter. I wanted to try to call her, but I knew all of our phones were constantly monitored. I learned about the Researchers in the article and the YouTube video they’d released. So I reached out in desperation with an encrypted message to them, and they responded.

“The days that followed … were among the most frightening of my life. I had stolen the files on your and your grandmother’s cases and copied the videos. I hid the best I could, jumping at every noise outside the motel room where I’d disappeared to. I knew the agents were searching for me, desperate to recover what I’d taken. When at last I heard a knock at my door, exactly in the manner the Researchers said it would be, I opened it to find another face that had become plastered across the world’s news organizations.”

She looked over to Steven.