I nodded. “Couldn’t sleep. Did you?”

He shook his head. “Tossed and turned. Karen probably wanted to kill me.”

The air in the room shifted, and the silence that ensued felt heavier than the dishonesty I was about to display. “How’re the kids?”

Kitsch smiled. “Emily’s almost outgrown her car seat, you know. We’re looking for booster seats now. That’s a thing, I guess. And Dylan’s talking about football this year.”

I shook my head and patted his shoulder. “Time flies, man.”

He nodded, and I turned to glance at the strange look on Martinez’s face. He understood, he wouldn’t argue. We all played along, but the question was how long we should allow it.

The door opened again, and we all greeted Sloan. He was tall, lanky, and a bigger smart ass than Martinez, but he was a hell of a sniper and teammate. I looked around for his package. “You’re too late for the official greeting.”

He looked down at his watch, giving me a side-hug. “Damn. It’s ten ‘til.”

“The only thing I did was not die,” Trex said from the other side of the door just before stepping through with Bianca.

“Fuck me in the ass,” Martinez said, standing from the table he was just leaning on. Trex took a hug from Martinez, Kitsch, Sloan and then shook Harbinger’s hand.

Bianca took us on a quick tour, describing each section. The corridors were basic phonetic alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Charlie and Delta. I was surprised to see fairly quickly into the tour that Bianca wasn’t the only civilian, far from it. Labs were bustling with men and women in white coats sitting in front of tech I’d never seen. We came across two sets of thick blast doors, and rooms full of airmen with patches on their sleeves that read CMAFE, doors guarded by soldiers in uniforms I didn’t recognize. The further we dug in, the staler the air became.

The white painted walls became steel tunnels. Weeping pipes ran along the curved walls and ceiling, and my boots clanged against a metal grid that made up the floor. A low hum churned throughout the corridor, interrupted by the intermittent dripping of water sliding down the already damp rock walls.

“Doesn’t feel right,” Martinez said.

“Easy,” Trex whispered back.

“What you’re feeling is a combination of frequency and vibration experiments and the way it affects the mountain. You’re not wrong,” a woman said from behind us. We turned to face her. She was older, a mess of blonde, frizzy hair, yet unexpectedly elegant, wearing peach-hued plastic glasses on the tip of her nose. She held her hand out to Trex, and he took it. “Dr. Sybil DuPont.”

Kitsch sniffed. “Doctor of what?”

“Astrophysics,” Dr. DuPont said.

Our team traded glances.