It was easier to think of it now without three eager sets of eyes on me, but slightly complicated by the fact that I was running on fumes, sleepwise. With more than enough time to kill, I started in again—rearranging them, trying to create anagrams, substituting different letters for others.

The feeling snuck up on me slowly, crawling back up through the crowded, tired portions of my brain. The other number—540—where had I seen that? Why did it feel like—?

When it came to me, I almost laughed. Almost.

I had seen the number on the radio in Greg’s memory only a few hours earlier, burning brightly through even the murkiest clouds of his thoughts.

It was 540 AM—a radio station.

Shaking Chubs back awake wasn’t enough for me, not when I thought I would actually burst at the seams with excitement. I all but pounced onto Chubs’s back, both scaring him senseless and kneeing him in the kidney in the process. I’m not sure what sound he made when I landed, but I was fairly certain it wasn’t human.

“Wake up, wake up, wake up!” I hissed, hauling him huffing and puffing and cursing to his feet. “When they gave you EDO, did they say anything else?”

“Green, if I can still walk tomorrow, so help me God—”

“Listen to me!” I hissed. “Did they say anything about tuning in, or picking it up?”

He fixed me with a baleful look. “All they said was to check out Edo.”

“Check out?” I repeated. “Those exact words?”

“Yes!” he said, exasperated. “Why?”

“I was wrong before,” I said. “I don’t think the number has anything to do with a phone number. We were right before. The last letter isn’t a letter at all—it was supposed to be a zero. Five forty. It’s some kind of radio station.”

“How in the world did you reach that conclusion?”

Ah. The tricky part in all of this. How to B.S. the fact I had cheated and seen the answer, rather than being in possession of brain power to actually work it through. “I was trying to think of what else uses three digit numbers, when I remembered hearing them—Greg and the others, I mean—talk about needing to find a radio here. I should have mentioned it to you guys before, but I didn’t think anything of it until now.”

“Oh my God.” Chubs was shaking his head, mildly stunned. “I don’t even believe it. We have honestly had such shit luck this entire trip I thought at least two of us were going to end up dead in a ditch somewhere before we figured it out.”

“We need a radio,” I said. “I think I’m right, but if I’m not…we need to test it before telling the others.”

“Betty?”

“No!” I wasn’t about to leave the tent unguarded, even for fifteen minutes. “I thought I saw a radio in the back—let me go grab it.”

The store was rushing around me in dark streams and fading colors as I ran, but I wasn’t afraid of what was lurking there, not now. I hadn’t imagined the radio after all. It was back in the small cluster of rafts and blankets that Liam and his friend had set up the last time he was here.