Alan fixed his eyes on Ethan.

“I found who killed her,” Ethan said.

Alan’s jaw tensed.

“It was your boss. And Pam.”

Alan said, “You come in here with an accusation like that you better be able to—”

“Prove it?” Ethan pointed at his pocket. “May I?”

“Slowly.”

Ethan reached in, fingers probing until he felt it. Lifting out the memory shard, he held up the square shaving of metal, and said, “Pilcher and Pam killed Alyssa. But first they tortured her. The head of surveillance gave this to me. It shows everything.” Alan kept the gun trained on Ethan, his expression unreadable. “I have a question for you, Alan,” Ethan said. “If what I’m telling you is true, where does your loyalty fall?”

“He’s playing you,” Marcus growled.

“One way to find out,” Ethan said. “What does it cost you to look at this, Alan? Unless avenging Alyssa isn’t something that interests you.”

Behind the glass doors, Ethan saw another armed man sprinting down the corridor.

He was dressed in black, armed with a Taser, pistol, machine gun, and testosterone. As he approached the glass doors, he spotted Ethan and raised his weapon. Alan suddenly wrapped his right arm around Ethan’s neck and held his pistol to Ethan’s temple.

The doors whisked open.

Alan said, “I’ve got him. Stand down.”

“Kill him!” Marcus screamed. “You have orders!”

The new arrival said, “Alan, what the hell are you doing?”

“You do not want to shoot this man, Mustin. Not yet.”

“What I want and don’t want doesn’t have a whole helluva lot to do with it. You know that better than any of us.”

Alan tightened his grip on Ethan.

“Sheriff says the town’s been overrun with aberrations and that the bossman opened up the gate. He also says that Mr. Pilcher and Pam are responsible for Alyssa’s death.”

“One thing to say it,” Mustin said. “Another to prove it.”

Ethan held up the memory shard.

“He claims it has footage of Alyssa’s death.”

“So what?” Marcus said.

Alan leveled a wilting glare at the young man. “What are you saying, son? That on the wild assumption any of this is true, you’d be a-okay with Mr. Pilcher killing one of our own, his own daughter, and trying to hide it? You’d just go along with that?”

“He’s the boss,” Marcus said. “If he did something like that, I bet he had—”

“He’s not God, is he?”

A scream raced up the tunnel and went reverberating through the ark.

Alan released Ethan and said, “What was that?”

“Sounds like some of the abbies found their way into the mountain,” Ethan said. “I drove through the entrance to the tunnel.”

Alan looked at Mustin’s weapon. “What do we have that’s meaner than an AR-15?”

“An M230 chain gun on a rolling mount.”