Nora sits at her desk with her hands clasped neatly in her lap. In front of her is one of Crotter’s composition notebooks. She finds in it mostly excerpts of John 3:16 and Romans 3:23 and Proverbs 3:5, but he also writes occasionally about how God is talking to him. He says he hears Him best when climbing the cell towers, because they focus the connection. His voice comes between the signals. His voice comes through the antenna. There are no words, only a feeling. A feeling like darkness gathering. A feeling like tentacles reaching. God is coming. And Crotter is but a servant of His hunger. These are often the places on the page where his handwriting frizzes apart, like split threads, becoming something unreadable.

She stares straight ahead into the dead screen of her monitor. Everything else has faded to a blur. She isn’t aware of the room buzzing all around her, of the wall-mounted television playing coverage of a plane that mysteriously vanished while en route to Alaska, of the people who occasionally glance her way and say, “Looks like Abernathy’s gone fishing.”

That’s what she calls it when she’s deep in the zone. Fishing. The sensation is equivalent to floating on a boat in the middle of a calm black lake. But nothing is a better word for it. She was in the nothing. Nowhere. If she’s still enough, quiet enough, something will rise to the surface and dimple the water. A realization. A connection. She learned the move from Sherlock Holmes, who referred to it as his mind palace, and she supposes it’s a form of creative meditation. Sometimes she goes to the nothing to crack a case. Sometimes she uses it to calm herself.

The lake is where she went after Mia vanished, and more than once she thought she saw the shape of her daughter faintly below, a pale surge that sizzled briefly with bubbles and then was gone.

She can sense something now. Stirring in the deep. Darting beneath the surface. There are the meteors falling from the sky, and there is Crotter falling from the cell tower. There is Crotter writing furiously into his notebook an apocalyptic translation he can’t quite manage, and there is a body found in a park with a similar cipher etched onto its skin. There is Ashley slumped in her cell, and there is death fouling the air, and there is Crotter falling from the tower, and there are the meteors falling from the sky, and there is the connection that for now remains unknowable.

Then she blinks—and, with a disorienting lurch, finds herself at the station once more. Her desk phone is ringing. She suspects it has been ringing for a long time. She snatches the handset from its cradle and clears her throat. “Abernathy.”

“Yeah, you’re the one who priority-tagged the bloodwork on—um, what’s her face—on an Ashley Harlow?”

“Yes.”